Photo by GlennFleishman
The list of places in the world where you can safely avoid updating your Facebook profile got smaller last week with Virgin America’s launch of in-flight WiFi on all its 100 daily routes. Unless you were one of the working stiffs on the test flight out of San Francisco (pictured above) access will cost $9.95 on short flights (under three hours), $12.95 for longer hauls, with discounted rates for handheld users and Web junkies taking the red-eye.
So, let the airborne Internet races begin, or rather, speed up: The announcement sucked the wind out of news earlier in the week from AirTran that it will begin offering the service on all its flights in July, and you already may have stumbled onto Wi-Fi-enabled flights from American Airlines, Delta and United, which have partnered with Virgin America’s service provider Gogo; trial runs of JetBlue's free-but-buggy BetaBlue; or Row 44 satellite-enabled flights on Southwest and Alaska Airlines. Internationally, onboard Wi-Fi is also in the works at Air Canada (through Gogo) and Norwegian Air Shuttle (Row 44).
I’m eager to see this capability become universal, as it seems it will, but for now I can’t decide if the possibility of having Wi-Fi would make me choose one carrier over another when booking a flight. Especially since, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out earlier this month, it’s going to be a while before companies with many more planes than Virgin America’s 28 will be able to guarantee in advance which ones will have Wi-Fi capability. Plus, with the baggage fees and the snack charges and so on, will I really want to throw down another chunk of change just so I can blog mid-flight? Is this blog post worth $12.95? Don’t answer that.
