Seven major airlines have teamed up with Gogo Inflight Internet to provide free access to Facebook during flights. Accessing other pages on the web, however, requires payment, ranging between $5 for short flights or $13 for long ones. Facebook is the most popular place visited on the Gogo network and is being used as a promo to drive adoption of in-air Internet use.
Continental Airlines today set out more concrete plans for its in-flight Wi-Fi service. Pushed back from its original January 2009 target, the service is now due to launch in spring aboard 21 Boeing 757 airliners. Most of these will be present on domestic flights, the transport service says.
United Airlines this week began deploying Wi-Fi on some of its flights. The rollout will at first cover longer flights between California and New York and should have 13 Boeing 757 planes in United's fleet offering Internet access by mid-November. Much as with similar approaches from Virgin and other airlines, the new approach is based on Aircell's Gogo technology and shares a 3G cellular connection (typically EVDO Revision A) with the entire cabin over a Wi-Fi hotspot in the plane itself.
US Airways on Thursday announced it has partnered with AirCell to bring that company's Gogo in-flight hotspot service into its airplanes by early in 2010. Via Gogo, fliers will be able to browse the Internet, chat via instant messaging programs and download e-mail on their Wi-Fi notebooks, smartphones and other portable hardware. The Airbus A321 will be the first aircraft to get the feature and will carry Wi-Fi on some of its domestic flights.
