Delta launched Wi-Fi service on its international fleet this week, starting with a trio of 747s. The first installation is a year behind schedule and it's been a grueling process. That seems strange considering the airline has had Wi-Fi on airplanes for years now domestically.
What's the problem?
Early Wi-Fi installations domestically are actually nothing like the ones that Delta is installing on its international fleet.
Sure, you still surf the web the same way (in Delta's case, both domestic and international are provided by Gogo), but the way the data gets to and from the airplane is totally different.
Remember those old Airfone handsets that were installed on airplanes? You'd pay something like $10 million a minute to get a static-filled call down to a friend on the ground. That was made possible by a bunch of ground-based towers throughout the U.S. When it finally was determined that nobody ever used those things, the frequency was repurposed and Gogo stepped in to offer Internet service.
All the airlines had to do was install an antenna on the bottom of the airplane and it could start talking to those ground stations. Only one problem. It's kind of hard to put ground stations in the middle of the ocean. So for international service, something else had to be done.
The end result is that for Wi-Fi on international flights, satellite Internet is the way to go. You'd think that just slapping an antenna on top of the airplanes instead of the bottom would solve all the problems, right? Well, not really.
Satellite bandwidth is a lot more expensive, so the commercial model is more difficult. But installing the antenna has become much more difficult as well. See, there have been a lot of concerns lately about the radome (the radar dome that covers the antenna) not being able to withstand the impact of birds. Seriously. The FAA started making sure that the aircraft could continue a flight if the radome was hit with a four-pound bird traveling 400 miles per hour. Again, seriously.
This became such a big issue for antennae on top of the aircraft that LiveTV, another provider of Wi-Fi (among other things) put out a press release when it became the first to introduce a radome that passed the new tests.
This wasn't a huge issue for the 747, which has a big protective hump on top, but Delta has received approval for the A330 now too. Installations are going to pick up quickly once the 747s are completed by mid-year; the entire international fleet will be done by the end of 2015.
United has been actively installing Wi-Fi on its international fleet for about a year, and American has done some as well (these were started before the new rules went into effect). But next time you log on over the water, think about what had to happen to make this possible.
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