Nearly 20 months after announcing plans to offer inflight connectivity on its long-range widebodies Singapore Airlines (SIA) is making slow but sure progress in equipping the airliners.
At the end of April, two of SIA’s all-business Airbus A340-500s had been equipped and activated with OnAir’s Wi-Fi and mobile connectivity solutions. The rest of SIA’s five-strong A340-500 fleet is expected to go live with the services by mid-year, says OnAir director of public relations and communications Aurelie Branchereau-Giles. SIA currently flies the A340-500s from Singapore to Los Angeles and New York Newark.
At least a handful of Singapore Airlines’ 17 Airbus A380s have been enabled with OnAir’s Wi-Fi solution. The aircraft fly from Singapore to Frankfurt, London Heathrow, Los Angeles, New York JFK, Paris, Tokyo-Narita, and Zurich (final government authorisation to enact the service on SIA’s Melbourne and Sydney routes is expected to come during the second half of 2012).
Meanwhile, mobile connectivity on the A380s has not yet been activated, but will be made available to passengers starting at the end of this year, according to OnAir.
Singapore Airlines also plans to fit its complete Boeing 777-300ER fleet of 19 aircraft with OnAir inflight connectivity by around April 2014.
Asked to provide an update of its connectivity equipage, a SIA spokesman says: “Currently, OnAir inflight connectivity services are available on a limited number of our A345 and A380 aircraft. There are plans to roll out the services to more aircraft. More details will be available when we officially launch the service.”
HOW TO USE THE SERVICE
To use OnAir’s Wi-Fi offering, passengers connect to the wireless access point, create an OnAir login to use the service, and provide payment details. Once approved, access should become available almost immediately.
SIA offers a user-pay subscription service for Wi-Fi, charging US$11.95 and US$29.95 for 10MB and 26MB of data usage, respectively. The subscription is good for the same flight it is purchased on, and can be used with different devices (but on the condition the same subscription login isn’t used simultaneously with any other device).
According to Charlie Pryor, public relations consultant for OnAir, “[Passengers] don’t use huge amounts of bandwidth: the most popular web sites accessed over Internet OnAir are social networking, news and travel or holiday sites.”
By contrast, charges for OnAir’s mobile connectivity service appear on passengers’ own cell phone bills. At present, rates are akin to international roaming rates, but those are expected to ultimately come down.
The Inmarsat L-band-based SwiftBroadband aeronautical service that supports all of OnAir’s current services offers speeds of up to 432 Kbps. Emirates, Qantas and a raft of other airlines are customers of OnAir, a joint venture between SITA and Airbus.
SIA is no stranger to connectivity, however. The carrier lays claim to having been the first airline in the world to introduce satellite-based inflight telephones, when it launched the service in 1991. It also previously offered Connexion by Boeing’s now-defunct Ku-band satellite-supported airborne Internet service. The carrier will again offer Ku connectivity – this time through Panasonic Avionics – when it takes delivery of its Airbus A350 XWBs.
June 20, 2012 at 7:08 am
This seems like a joke! A decision that seems to have been taken without much customer feedback or research. I’m surprised something like this is coming out of SIA’s kitty, which is usually a very meticulous airline.
Just think about this. If I’m paying $10,000 for a flight from EWR-SIN on their A345, then shouldn’t I be accorded some privileges like free wifi? And the rates they’re charging are unrealistic – each time I sync my email, it’s more than 10mb, and the moment you go to Facebook, with all the photos etc, 26mb will run out in no time. Then what? Pay excess?
They should have either offered a flat price for the whole length of the flight, like Lufthansa is doing, or offer it free – like Hong Kong Airlines does on its all-business class flight from London Gatwick to Hong Kong. In fact, airlines like SAS Scandinavian offer it free across classes and make money from advertisers.
SIA and OnAir need to go back to the drawing board, because there’s no point offering rates that will garner 1-2% adoption. It won’t generate revenue, nor enhance the passenger experience.
June 21, 2012 at 7:31 am
Hong Kong Airlines only offer 10mb free in Club Classic and 20mb free in Club Premier Class. Afterwards, it is $37/20mb and $20/10mb. It really depends on the business case. You have to buy x number of mb from OnAir and also you will need to pay administrative fees, system fees etc. There can never be a free unlimited service because no matter what the airline will have to buy the mb unless OnAir provide an unlimited package to Airlines. Or say they cap it somehow. The argument can be made for hotels. How many hotels our there offer free internet?
It will be interesting to see what CX will charge when their Panasonic Ku Band eXconnect get installed in some of their aircraft this year. Connectivity fare war maybe?
IFE systems is already a huge cost for airlines. Maintenance fee that goes into these system, buying media and movies, media uploads and the actual costs of the system alone. Unfortunately for the airlines, IFE has became a norm for full service airlines. Fortunate for the passengers.
June 21, 2012 at 5:51 pm
The OnAir pricing models adopted by the different airlines are interesting, and Hong Kong Airlines has chosen to offer the service at a reasonable price point as compared to the other OnAir-enabled carriers (including Emirates, Qantas, and Singapore Airlines).
Information pertaining to the revenue generated by the airlines is obviously unavailable (for public scrutiny). But for OnAir, the pricing structure for the “Internet OnAir” component is primarily determined by the airline in question — in other words, it’s the carrier who decides how much a pax needs to pay.
As far as I know, HX is the only airline who hands out those cards to passengers on their Hong Kong – London Gatwick flights, and granted that 10MB and 20MB respectively isn’t a lot. For both Singapore Airlines and Qantas, which I’ve personally experienced using the OnAir service, it’s purely up to the user if they want to utilise this value-added service or not.
Shashank makes a good point about how the cost of such a service should be factored into the cost of the ticket, and even have it made as a flat-rate service for the entire flight at the very least. In this day and age, being offered service packages with only more-than-a-couple-of-megabytes of usage does seem preposterous.
I managed to stay within 25 megabytes on a 15-hour flight doing what I would normally do on my smartphone (that is: iMessage, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, and a little bit of Facebook and email on the side). I even decided to pump it to my 40MB quota after learning I still had plenty left two hours before my flight’s arrival.
But given how onboard Wi-Fi is still perceived as a “value-added”, or even “premium” service, by almost all carriers supporting it in some kind or form, time will do the service justice — both through broader adoption of the service, and the subsequent increase in use by willing passengers.
Hence, I am extremely curious, and watching with great interest (on the sidelines), how the other airlines will introduce their onboard Internet service once they are implemented and in service — and CX’s eXconnect service, mentioned by Calvin, is certainly one of them.