OnAir is a joint venture formed last year by aircraft maker Airbus, airline comms provider SITA, and specialist ISV Tenzing. It has dual headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, where airborne voice services are being developed, and Seattle, Washington, where the focus is data services. Its holding company is based in the Netherlands.
George Cooper, OnAir’s CEO, said the two companies have taken a fundamentally different approach to developing passenger communication services, from the very basics of the technology used, to the most fundamental element: the needs and preferences of the target market.
The differences between OnAir and CdB are mainly in two areas. In terms of the services offered, whereas CdB was all about WiFi in the Sky laptop connectivity for data, that is only the high or premium end of the OnAir offering. Its services will also include voice calling from mobile phones and BlackBerry use, as well as webchat and webmail access from seat-back screens, all of which will be considerably cheaper. Imagine you’d been on holiday to Thailand and, during the long flight back to, say, London or San Francisco you wanted to check your Hotmail account, you could do that for around five bucks, said a spokesperson for OnAir who said the expectation is for voice to be the main service rather than data.
In addition to the wider range of services, OnAir also has a better cost structure, which stems from its use of different satellite infrastructure to deliver them. Whereas CbB was leasing transponders on Ku-band satellites, OnAir will go out over a pay-as-you-use transponder on Inmarsat’s new L-band satellites, the I4 constellation. In other words, whereas CdB was paying to have the transponders available all the time, regardless of how many travellers were actually using them, OnAir will only pay for Inmarsat’s SwiftBroadband service as and when someone is using its services.
Aside from the airlines left in the lurch by CdB’s untimely end, one carrier that will be looking for an alternative supplier is BT Global Service, whose BT Infonet arm last year added an airborne dimension to its MobileXpress remote connectivity service for corporate laptop users, called MobileXpress In-Flight. BTGS would at least appear to be a natural target customer for OnAir now. BT told Computer Business Review in a statement: the BT position is as follows: our intent has remained to partner with organisations which can deliver high-quality, well-supported capabilities. We recognize that there are a number of in-flight broadband initiatives within the marketplace either announced or in the planning stages. We have had discussions previously with a variety of potential partners, and will continue to pursue the retention and expansion of the MobileXpress In-Flight service.
BT acknowledged, however, that there is no immediate replacement for the Connexion by Boeing capability. As a result, the shutdown of the Connexion by Boeing service will result in a suspension of the MobileXpress In-Flight services.
Cooper said the first launch will be of GSM and GPRS services in western European flights next year, followed by broadband internet on longhaul ones at a later point, though still in 2007.
