Subject: [NEXTEL-1] The Newsletter: Countdown to in-flight broadband

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 04:19:15 -0500

Stephen Dunphy / Times staff columnist
The Newsletter: Countdown to in-flight broadband

                  Thursday, February 19, 2004 -

Connexion by Boeing will begin in-flight broadband Internet service
within the next 45 days on a Lufthansa flight to Japan,
marking what is expected to be an intense battle for the market to
provide passengers with in-flight e-mail.

Scott Carson, president, told the monthly dean's breakfast at the
University of Washington Business School that Connexion has
18 "campaigns" under way with potential airline customers around the
world. The company has six firm customers, including
Singapore Airlines and Japan Airlines, both considered trendsetters in
international markets. Carson said the business also is
moving into maritime and business-jet services.

The Lufthansa flight will be the first commercial use of the service,
which incorporates satellite technology to provide a
broadband in-flight service. Passengers will pay a flat fee for the
service per flight, reportedly between $16 and $23.

Carson said Connexion's service is different from existing services
because it is a broadband connection, meaning it can handle
big files, and because it can be linked to other information
applications on an aircraft. For example, flight-data recorders could
be downloaded in flight, providing airlines with advance warning of
repairs needed on arrival.

Several low-cost airlines are looking at Connexion, Carson said, because
if "they can trim turn times from 28 minutes to 26
minutes, it is worth it."

The big competitor for Connexion is JetConnect, already in use by United
Airlines.

It is made by privately held Tenzing, which was founded in 1998 in
Australia but moved to Seattle in 1999. In June 2001,
Airbus bought a 30 percent stake for about $44 million; its equity share
has since increased by an undisclosed amount.

Tenzing's service offers e-mail and text messaging at a rate equivalent
to a slow dial-up service. The company recently added a
wireless system, to be used by Emirates Airline of Dubai.

United's service will use the Verizon seat-back phones with passengers
plugging in to the phone's data jack.

E-mail service will cost $16 per flight, with an extra dime per kilobyte
of data sent beyond an initial 2 kilobytes, making
handling large files expensive.

Broadband Internet dominates and wireless Internet growth explodes.
That's the headline on new U.S. data on Internet use
from Ipsos-Insight, a New York marketing-research firm.

Its annual "Face of the Web" study showed dial-up service still used by
many. In the United States, broadband is catching up,
with 47 percent logging on through some form of high-speed connection,
the study showed.

Wireless is booming, growing 145 percent in 2003, but that growth is
from a relatively small base.

Chinese New Year is a great celebration, but it can hurt companies
trying to do business in Asia. January data from the Port
of Los Angeles show what happens when Asian firms typically shut down
for up to a week. The holiday was in January this
year, February last year, but both months usually are affected.

The number of loaded import containers was up by 28.8 percent over
January 2003, but the number of loaded export
containers declined by 8 percent. For the month, the total number of
containers — import, export and empties — was up 18.8
percent to 616,087 20-foot-equivalent units, or TEUs, the industry's
standard measurement.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2001860553_dunphy19.html

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