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Cape Town - Technical limitations such as costs and bandwidth are holding back the widespread adoption of free in-flight Wi-Fi but airliners are working on overcoming these challenges.
"If we can offer good quality Wi-Fi connections for everyone onboard at no charge tomorrow, we will do it. But we face a slew of technical limitations - from speed and bandwidth availability and cost, to the supporting hardware and software - all of which we are working hard to address with the industry right now," said Sir Tim Clark, president Emirates Airline.
The airline reported a spike in Wi-Fi use during flights in October when an average of 3 800 travellers accessed the internet in a free promotion to mark the Eid holidays.
In the US, Delta offers Wi-Fi at $1.95 though the service is limited to the continental United States, and Singapore Airlines offers Wi-Fi based on data or time. Typically, the Asian service costs around $9.99 for 10MB or $11.95 for an hour.
In South Africa, G-Connect offers Wi-Fi vouchers starting at R50 to R250 for use during flights.
Mobile data growth
Emirates is pushing to make data services available as part of the flight service, but also as a competitive advantage.
"It is a fact that our customers want onboard connectivity, and this demand is only going to increase as more people embrace an 'always-on' digital lifestyle, and carry smart mobile devices when they travel. We've always viewed Wi-Fi as a service and a value-added part of Emirates' overall product, rather than a revenue stream," said Clark.
The company currently offers 10MB of data service free, and $1 for the next 600MB, though the airline conceded that on some aeroplanes, Wi-Fi is unavailable for technical reasons.
Free Wi-Fi access during flights can act as a competitive advantage. (Duncan Alfreds, Fin24)
According to data from Ericsson's Mobile Data Traffic Growth report for 2013 to 2019 in Sub-Saharan Africa, the region's data appetite is huge and expected to grow at 65% to 2019 and beyond.
Put into perspective, mobile data in the region was at 37 000 terabytes (TB) per month in 2013, and that will jump to 76 000TB by the end of 2014, on its way to a mammoth 764 000TB by the end of 2019.
Many mobile users are jumping from cellphone directly to smartphone, without bothering with a computer, in part because of the lack of cable broadband infrastructure and the cost of service which remains prohibitively expensive.
Popular sites
IT infrastructure firm Cisco predicts that mobile data traffic will dwarf the growth in cable broadband connections.
"From 2013 to 2018, Cisco anticipates that mobile traffic growth will be double fixed traffic growth in South Africa and that there will be 40 million mobile users by 2018, up from 38 million in 2013," the company said.
According to Emirates, the most frequent internet sites accessed during in-flight Wi-Fi service is Google, Facebook, and communication services Skype, WhatsApp and BBM.
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