In-flight Internet pricing plans

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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WirelessG this week announced that Sub-Saharan Africans will soon be able to connect to the Internet on domestic and long-haul flights.  WirelessG has an exclusive agreement, on the technology that will enable in-flight Internet services, with US-based Row 44, who is already successfully offering in-flight Wi-Fi Internet to Southwest Airlines and Alaska Airlines.

According to the broadband provider the first complete set of hardware will arrive in South Africa shortly, and will be used to set up a ground-based proof of concept (POC) in South Africa to test the complete solution.

WirelessG CEO Carel van der Merwe recently explained in a Moneyweb radio interview that the local technology which will be used is a satellite based solution which differs from the typical US based offerings that use a ground-to-air cellular technology though Aircell.

“They’ve got about 25% of the aeroplanes already linked up there, and you’ve got that much more planes in America, and they’ve got the scale advantage there. In Africa we don’t have the privilege to sweep the signal up from a ground to a plane model. We have to use satellite,” explains van der Merwe.

Van der Merwe further said that WirelessG used Vodacom Business to obtain satellite capacity:  “Another problem was to get satellite transponder space reserved for the South African market, and that we have done now through Vodacom Business Solutions, who assist us in getting capacity on that side. So bringing together the Row 44 on-board technology and the Intel SAT capacity and the Wireless G G-Connect billing platform, now we’ve got a business model at the end.”

WirelessG will use the G-Connect billing platform for its service which brings some advantages to consumers.  G-Connect currently offers a single account service for ADSL, 3G/HSDPA and Wi-Fi services, and the new in-flight connectivity will form part of this bundled offering.

“In America we’ve got a model where the customer pays per trip. In South Africa we will have a totally different model. We will also offer a per-trip model, but what’s different here is you take the G-connect platform, we’ll be able to integrate an on-board wireless broadband with the rest of the broadband packages like DSL, 3G and Wi-Fi,” explains Van der Merwe.

“So what you do not use in the plane you will not lose. You’ll be able to use that airtime with DSL or 3G at home. So our plan is to convert the on-board technology, the on-board airtime with the converged bundle in every ordinary day’s broadband. So that is the model.”

While the final pricing details are dependent on various factors, G-Connect customers can expect to pay less than for standard out-of-bundle cellular data.  “At this stage our business model predicts estimated pricing of between 50c en 90c per MB for G-Connect customers. We have not yet investigated pricing for integrated partners,” said G-Connect

The WirelessG CEO is confident that they will roll out the first commercial services in May/June this year – in time for the 2010 World Cup.  “[What] we have to do now is to submit the FAA approval to the CAA. Hopefully it’s just an endorsement, it is not a long process. We have to do that now. And we hope to have the first POC in April in the air and then with May/June have the first commercialised plane there,” Van der Merwe concluded.

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