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Lufthansa's partner, Connexion by Boeing, uses a proprietary two-way satellite network, with antennas mounted on the wing and access points inside the cabin, to enable flyers to surf at 30,000 ft. (Wi-fi doesn't interfere with plane communications because it operates on a different part of the spectrum, 2.4 GHz. In fact, it gives the airline a new way to talk to ground and maintenance crews.) The system takes about 10 minutes to boot up, but it's worth the wait; download speeds are comparable to a middling DSL connection, around 300 kilobits per second. Upload speeds are about twice that of dial-up, or around 100 kbps--not as good as the 700 kbps or so I clocked during my last session at Starbucks, but not bad, and enough to justify Connexion's fee ($10 for half an hour of access, $30 for the entire flight).
Given the financial woes facing U.S. carriers, few have the resources right now to invest in wi-fi; most will probably wait for Verizon to launch an in-flight wi-fi service that makes use of its existing Airfones network, sometime in 2005.
Rail operators, meanwhile, are beginning to take a hard look at the wireless Web. In Northern California, Canada and Britain, train companies are testing or preparing to launch their own wi-fi services.
Take, for example, the wi-fi car on the Altamont Commuter Express, which runs between Stockton, Calif., and San Jose. The service makes use of satellites for incoming Web traffic, but to keep costs down, it uses the nearest cellular network for outgoing. There are a few dead zones where you can't connect at all (a tunnel, a mountain pass), and connection delays can cause virtual private network (VPN) connections to time out. Still, users say they are grateful for any opportunity to stay connected on their way to work.
Kirk Van Katwyk, a software developer who lives in Tracey, Calif., says having Net access during the 90 minutes he spends on the train twice a day means he can get a head start in the morning and focus on the kids as soon as he arrives home at night. "I have dial-up at home, so I'm used to slow connections," he says, "and you get a feel for where it's spotty, so you plan around it. Because it's free, I think we can't complain."
LimoLiner, a luxury bus service between Boston and New York City, added wi-fi a few months ago, hoping to lure some business away from the air shuttle. But the service can be painfully slow, mainly because the wi-fi network onboard uses a cellular link to reach the Internet--for both downloads and uploads--and the cell networks along its travel route have not yet been upgraded for high-speed data.
They will be soon. Verizon, for example, is in the midst of rolling out its Broadband Access network nationally, but so far it's up only in Las Vegas, San Diego and Washington. The service promises up to 700 kbps--several times faster than what I'm getting here in the back of Frank's Lincoln. When all this bandwidth becomes widely available to LimoLiner, Carey cars and other roving hot spots, experts say, mobile wi-fi will be a lot more compelling--consumers might even be willing to pay for it.