Prices and Early Usage

Aircell's service, which is branded as Gogo Inflight Internet, currently has a single pricing model: $9.95 for flights under three hours, and $12.95 for flights of three hours or more. The company plans a number of more esoteric pricing options for later this year.

Aircell CEO Jack Blumenstein said that the company will offer to its airline partners options such as time-of-day pricing, fees based on routes, and specials for events like the NCAA March Madness. Subscription rates are also in the works, as well as deals with access aggregators like Boingo Wireless and iPass. (Aggregator customers might get discounts, a single bill, and single–log-in advantages, but not unlimited access with existing $20 to $30 U.S. hotspot plans.)

Virgin America will offer a $5.95 red-eye discount for overnight flights in the near future, said its communications director, Abby Lunardini.

Row 44's two pilot customers, Alaska and Southwest, haven't announced prices yet; both airlines have many shorter routes. Alaska's vice president of marketing, Steve Jarvis, said Alaska was aiming for a "relatively inexpensive" price compared with previous offerings, implying Connexion, which charged from $10 to $30 depending on a flight's duration.

Jarvis said that options such as free and discounted internet service for its best fliers might also be in the mix, but Alaska simply doesn't have enough data on which to act yet.

There's been little buzz on blogs or traveler forums about the currently available services, but all the airlines and service operators I spoke to were fairly ecstatic about early uptake rates both in free trials and paid sessions.

Virgin America's Lunardini said the airline had seen over 30 percent usage on a number of flights, and the airline's targets for use were already exceeded. Virgin America is "overwhelmed with the amount of users that we've seen thus far," Lunardini said.

Blumenstein of Aircell said of that number, "That is not inconsistent in any way with what we're seeing on a lot of flights." He said that when you looked at the number of people on a flight carrying a device capable of a WiFi connection, "we're starting to see a very significant percentage of available passengers using the system on a consistent basis."

Blumenstein said that repeat customers had grown significantly in a short time, now approaching "half the people" using the service. One customer wrote Aircell and said he was peeved because he'd arranged to fly on a Gogo-enabled flight from JFK, but the airline had to shift equipment. As airlines roll out fleetwide, that concern should ebb.

While people are logged into internet access, they use it quite heavily. Blumenstein said data usage is about twice what people transfer in hotspot locations, according to Aircell's analysis. "Some of it may be the novelty," he said.

On a recent flight, Southwest Airlines saw 50 percent of passengers using the free service it's offering on just two planes at the moment. Row 44's CEO, John Guidon, said that in tests, the company sees a "pretty good center of gravity" at about 20 percent of passengers accessing the network.

Guidon noted that "the people who are on, they are staying on for a long time." On the Southwest flight with half the passengers using Row 44's service, average usage was about 82 minutes, Guidon said.

Up Next: Streaming and Stored Entertainment

The present may seem interesting enough, with high-speed broadband reaching from 600 to 800 planes by the end of 2009 over the U.S., but there's still quite a lot to come.

Because Alaska and Southwest lack entertainment systems, the two airlines are quite interested in what Row 44 could bring them. Row 44's head, John Guidon, emphasized that his firm isn't an entertainment provider, but that it could deliver quite a lot of video content. "If you were to characterize us, we're a lot of connectivity and a little bit of television," he said.

Alaska's Jarvis notes that with passengers typically bringing laptops and media players on board, "they're going to want to use their own device, not one we shove in their face." This sentiment was echoed by Whitney Eichinger at Southwest: "You already have so many customers traveling with their laptops" and other devices that the airline doesn't need to go to every seat and "put a lot of wiring on board for onboard entertainment." Aircell's literal black box: an onboard server, with a 1TB drive inside waiting to be filled with content.

While JetBlue's LiveTV division hasn't disclosed its complete plans for what it might do with its 1MHz of spectrum, it's easy to see how the uplink could be used to deliver and cache content for onboard distribution with email and limited services available as an extra, either for a small fee or as an incentive to fly.

Aircell has more concrete plans. The company has a 1TB server in every system it's put into a plane. "You wouldn't be surprised to know that we'll be activating that Trojan Horse here before long," said Aircell's Blumenstein. He said the company had designed the onboard wireless LAN to be able to handle "everyone" taking a media stream from the onboard server while engaged in other internet activities as well.

Row 44, by contrast, has a big enough pipe for streaming video that an onboard media server isn't yet of interest. "We don't want to carry an extra pound for something we believe does not benefit the heart of what we're doing," he said.

This is an edited-down version of a story that originally appeared on arstechnica.com. To read the complete story, click here.