Broadband joins the mile high club

British Airways (BA) and Lufthansa will be the first airline carriers to pilot a satellite broadband service allowing passengers to surf the web and send email at 30,000 feet.

Lufthansa is demonstrating the technology today and BA is set to begin a pilot next month.

Passengers in BA's first class, world club and world traveller plus cabins will be able to pay between £15 and £20 per flight for access to the internet.

BA will trial the technology for three months on one aircraft on the London to New York route before making any decision on a wider rollout. A spokeswoman for BA said there had been significant passenger interest.

"We've done a lot of research with business passengers and 75 per cent of them said they take laptops and are extremely interested in internet access," she said.

The service will be the first commercial deployment of Boeing's Connexion broadband technology, with the exception of some US government VIP planes understood to be already using it.

Ed Laase, director of system development at Connexion by Boeing, told vnunet.com that research had shown demand for the technology among airline carriers and passengers.

"We've done quite a bit of research and the primary target is the business traveller who wants to use a virtual private network to access their corporate email," he said.

Despite US carriers United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta pulling out of Connexion last year, Laase revealed that letters of intent have already been signed with Lufthansa, BA, Japan Air and Scandinavian Airlines.

"We plan to roll it [Connexion] out to 4,000 planes over the next 10 years," he said.

Antenna technology attached to the plane will track the broadband satellite so that passengers can plug their laptops in to a high-speed service offering data rates of around 512Kbps per user.

Other carriers have not revealed their pricing for the service, but Laase expects it to be comparable to terrestrial mobile phone costs.

As to the thorny issue of whether passengers might be tempted to make the most of the fast connection by accessing porn sites instead of watching the in-flight movie, Laase explained that airlines would have their own policies.

"Each airline will make a decision on that but I anticipate there will be some kind of content filtering," he said.