Today is the day. If you live in the Metroplex, come on out to DFW for a little Crankyspotting between 10a and noon. It should be a beautiful day for watching airplanes. We’ll be at Founders Plaza (map).

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United is First U.S. Carrier to Offer Wi-Fi on Long-Haul Flights – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
United narrowly beat out the others for the first long haul wifi for a US carrier. I talk about what it took so long to get here.

In the Trenches: Managing Year-End Forms – Intuit Small Business Blog
It’s the end of the year. The fun part is looking back on the year. The not-fun part involves tax forms.

Why is American Airlines Changing Its Stripes? – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
A bonus CN post this week talking about American’s new livery. This isn’t about the livery itself but rather, why it’s being changed.

It didn’t make huge news, but last week when Qantas announced it had decided to stop offering internet onboard on its A380 fleet after a trial run, it caught my eye. After all, with airlines racing to install internet across the globe, this seems to fly in the face of general industry practice. Is this smart or simply short-sighted?

The airline installed wifi on a handful of A380s and offered it on flights from Australia to London and to the US from March through November. After the test concluded, Qantas decided it wasn’t worth it. Apparently, about 5 percent of travelers used the service and that wasn’t enough.

Qantas said:

Right now, our customers are telling us that access to the Internet on the ground is more important than in the air. We are continuing to invest in upgrading Wi-Fi technology across our domestic and international lounge network. We will continue to evaluate demand for Wi-Fi options onboard.

Wifi in lounges? That’s an absolute requirement. I’m not sure what kind of upgrading the airline is doing, but that should be a given to have functioning internet there. That should have nothing to do with the decision to offer it onboard flights that take 15 hours or more.

The 5 percent usage rate (with prices going from about A$13 to A$40) is low, but it’s not absurdly low compared to what others have seen. But the whole point of wifi is that in an increasingly connected world, people will start demanding this more and more. If Qantas has already put the antennas on some airplanes, it’s already done the hard part. So is this just the airline thinking short term and not really realizing that it needs wifi in the long run? Quite possibly.

But Qantas thinks that it’s special compared to other airlines.

Most of our A380 services operate at night and so another dampener on demand was the fact people preferred to sleep than surf the Web

It is true that Qantas has a lot of night flying, but come on. It’s not like these airplanes just sit around all day waiting for the sun to set.

The flights from LA to Australia and from Australia to London leave late in the evening and arrive early morning. But they’re still more than 15 hours long. People don’t sleep for 15 hours. Besides, the return flights leave in the early afternoon to LA . Yes, they go overnight, but there is still plenty of time during the day. From London, it’s an evening departure but you basically fly through an entire day with two overnights.

I suppose the point is that anytime you have really long flights, people will be looking for distractions. Maybe they aren’t looking for internet as much yet, but that will change over time. We’ve already seen it change domestically as more people have come to expect it on their flights.

Will this move hurt Qantas? It could. Delta is getting ready to put wifi on its international aircraft, and that will compete on the LA run. United is doing the same. Going over to London, its new partner Emirates is doing wifi as is Singapore. I believe Cathay is working on a test too.

So Qantas risks being the odd man out. Maybe those people with no self control who hate being connected will prefer Qantas, but for the rest, this could be a short-sighted decision. Then again, if Qantas starts seeing demand go downhill, I’d bet it reconsiders this move. But you can’t just flip a switch and have internet right away. It takes time, and that could hurt.

I’m enjoying a Lava Flow on the beach right now, so feel free to grab a glass and a tiny umbrella and join me while you read about what I learned about onboard wifi on my visit to Panasonic headquarters.
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A couple weeks ago, the crew at Panasonic Avionics invited me down to their headquarters to talk shop about inflight internet. I have to say it was a very interesting learning experience. From Panasonic’s point of view, the rush to newer frequency Ka band offerings isn’t necessary despite all the hype. Panasonic sees things differently and has its own solution for providing fast wifi that does seem to be getting good traction. (Singapore Airlines just announced it’s onboard.) Excuse me for getting a little wonky here, but let’s talk about spot beams.

I sat with David Bruner, VP of Global Communications Services for Panasonic Avionics and he laid out how Panasonic is going about tackling this project. For travelers, the issue with wifi is, of course, speed. When there were very few people using the service and they weren’t using a lot of bandwidth, speed wasn’t as much of an issue. But the usage has been exploding and it’s only going to grow. Today, generally 5 to 10 percent of passengers on Panasonic-equipped airplanes use internet service. (On Turkish, where the internet is free to passengers, they’ll see 50 to 100 people on some flights.) Of course, the number of people who will want to log on will continue to grow.

But it’s not just about the number of people. It’s about how much bandwidth each person uses. In just a short time, usage per passenger on Lufthansa (which has the Panasonic system) has doubled to an average of 120 MBs per flight. It’s not going to go down, so how can this problem be solved?

Ka Isn’t The Only Answer
Many have touted newer Ka (“kay-ay“) band frequency options as the way forward. JetBlue will be installing that on its fleet (someday) and United will have that on a chunk of its domestic fleet as well. For the lion’s share, however, United has gone with Panasonic as have several others. But Panasonic isn’t going to Ka band. It’s sticking with Ku band satellite technology despite the suggestion by many (including me) that Ku band bandwidth is just too expensive. According to Panasonic, it’s not the frequency that’s expensive but rather the way it’s deployed today.

The problem is one of efficiency. My understanding after a brief technical overview is that the general way that the satellite is set up is to broadcast over a very broad area. This gives maximum coverage over wide expanses; something that’s important when you really need global coverage, but it means that the power isn’t going to be particularly strong in any one place. So it won’t be as fast and it will cost more since the satellite is covering such a wide area and the wifi providers aren’t going to use everything they’re paying for.

What Panasonic has done is partner with Intelsat on its new EpicNG program. In other words, Intelsat is putting this new network up into space and Panasonic will be buying a chunk of the end product. This isn’t a Ka band program but rather Ku band. This is great for Panasonic because by the time it’s up and running in 2015/2016, there will be 600 to 700 airplanes already using Panasonic’s current Ku service. And that means that there won’t be expensive antenna changes required on each aircraft to use the new service.

According to Panasonic, they were ready to switch to Ka band if they needed to do it, but they didn’t see any real value. This EpicNG offering should do everything you could want, or so they say. And there is no service disruption while we wait for it to launch so airlines can start installing it today.

What this does is utilize spot beams in heavily-trafficked areas. Instead of just trying for breadth of coverage, Panasonic will focus some of its bandwidth on specific air traffic corridors. There will be several spot beams pointing toward the US, over the North Atlantic, and over Eurasia. The result is that in the 2015-2018 time frame, these spot beams should cover about 85 percent of the demand.

What about everywhere else? There will still be satellite coverage over those areas but it will be broad beam. The bandwidth will be less by the time it gets to the airplane, but with fewer planes over those areas it’s not as important because demand will be lower. As demand grows, there is always the opportunity to add more coverage if needed. It just costs money to do it. (In fact, all of this costs a silly amount of money.)

When a Spot Beam Isn’t Ideal
There is one other interesting piece here. Spot beams aren’t all sunshine and roses. The biggest problem is that if you want to send information TO several aircraft, you would have to repeat it in every spot beam. This doesn’t matter for pure internet access because each person is sending and receiving individual data. But Panasonic has a live television option that it broadcasts to all airplanes. The spot beams are only about 1.5 degrees wide (just under 600 miles at the equator and less the closer you get to the poles) so they aren’t very big. It would cost a ton to repeat the broadcast in every spot beam. So what do they do?

Panasonic isn’t just buying spot beam capacity here. There will also be a broad area of coverage the overlays the spot beams so that Panasonic can continue to push live television and more while keeping costs down. (This is the same thing that will cover the areas not covered by spot beams for regular internet access.)

The upshot here, according to Panasonic, is that bandwidth costs should come down. In fact, it should be the same or better than Ka band. It seems Ka band antennas are more expensive right now because they’re newer but that will inevitably come down as well. Still, that will just make the costs equal. For Panasonic, the cost to stick with Ku band is way cheaper since it doesn’t require replacing existing equipment on aircraft. It also doesn’t require getting new regulatory approvals from each country (209 signed today) as it would have to do with Ka band.

This was a very interesting visit for me. It sounds like Panasonic should have a very strong product. I’ll just keep looking at which airlines go with which offerings because that should tell the tale. I will say this – Panasonic doesn’t appear to be the only one who believes in this technology. Gogo signed a deal with satellite provider SES to do something very similar. There is definitely room for competition here since eventually, I imagine every airplane will have wifi of some sort.

While wireless internet has become nearly ubiquitous on flights within the US (unless you fly United), international travel hasn’t seen the same result. Sure, some foreign airlines have started to install wifi, most notably Lufthansa, but the airlines based in the US have not. That will finally start changing later this year.

American was the first to announce that it would put wifi on international aircraft – it is expected to have its first 777-300ER delivered by the end of this year with wifi. But we don’t know which provider will be used. We also so far know that it will only be on the 777s. Nothing has been said about the airline’s large fleet of 767s and internationally-configured 757s. As of last week, Delta has decided to go much further.

Beginning in early 2013, Delta will begin installing wifi on its entire long haul fleet. This means it will go on the A330s, 777s, 747s, and the 767s and 757s that fly internationally. (The 757s and 767s that fly domestically already have internet.) Once this is done, every airplane in the Delta fleet with more than 50 seats (including Delta Connection) will have wifi. That’s actually quite the feat considering we’re talking about around 1,000 aircraft.

As you may know, Delta currently has internet on domestic flights via Gogo using air-to-ground technology. That means the airplanes have antennas that point down to stations on the ground to get connected. That works on land but it’s not the easiest thing to install ground stations in water. (Any volunteers for anchoring them thousands of feet under sea level?) So, what could Delta do? It looked at several providers and ultimately decided to stick with the same one, Gogo, using Ku band satellite technology.

This is great news for travelers for one reason. Gogo controls the pricing of its internet offering, so if Delta had them for domestic and someone else for international, that would have been a poor customer experience. What if you flew from Chicago to New York and then on to Barcelona? You would have had to sign up for Gogo service on the short flight and then something completely different on the long one. But since Delta is going with Gogo, it will have the ability to sell you a single pass to be good on all flights. The interface will be the same regardless of the hardware being used on the aircraft. And you’ll only need one account. And if Delta ends up using GogoVision to stream movies, you’d be able to watch them on both flights.

Now, about that hardware. Since air-to-ground clearly doesn’t work for this, Gogo had to go and choose something else. Delta has signed up for Ku band satellite coverage. If you’d ever used internet on Southwest, that’s what you get. It’s a perfectly capable system that doesn’t rely on the ground below. Ka band is supposed to be faster and cheaper, but it’s not really ready yet and Delta wanted to get moving. If down the line, Delta decided to make a change, I suppose it could theoretically do that fairly easily. But it’s also not entirely clear that there will be enough benefit to do so. That’s a topic for a future post.

So, Delta wants Ku band and it wants to get things done quickly. Now let’s just see if they can stick to the schedule. Gogo hasn’t installed Ku band systems yet, so it has some hoops to jump through before this will be up and running. Early 2013 is a nice goal to have – hopefully they can actually meet it. The fleet won’t be done until 2015. That’s annoying that it will take so long, but installing these satellite antennas takes more time than the air-to-ground ones, so it’s harder to schedule time to pull airplanes out of service.

So it’s going to take some time, but at least the install process starts in six months. Hopefully they’ll find a way to expedite this, because 2015 seems awfully far away.
Regardless, this is a good move by Delta. It’s creating a very consistent offering across its fleet and that’s important. It will be interesting to see if American does something similarly friendly or not. For that matter, it’ll be interesting to see if United ever gets off its butt and does anything.

[Original photo via Flickr user David Reber's Hammer Photography/CC 2.0]

In-Flight Entertainment Check: What You’ll Get on Each Airline – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
I did a round-up of domestic inflight entertainment options for Conde Nast.

Why Vegas Flights Might Cost More – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
Vegas opened its brand new $2.4 billion terminal this week, but it doesn’t really need it. Still, somebody has to pay for it . . .