Service Offers E-Mail at 40,000 Feet

Yardena Arar, PCWorld.com

It's easier, cheaper, and arguably more pleasant to send and receive e-mail during flights these days--if you happen to be on a plane offering the new Tenzing Global e-mail service.

Sure, it's possible to access e-mail on most planes, but that means dialing up your Internet service provider from one of those seat-back phones. With prices as high as $3 per minute and connection speeds topping out at 10 kbps, Web and e-mail downloads are pricey and unbearably slow.

Tenzing Communications' new service works better. On our test flight we found it much more usable for sending and reading standard POP3 e-mail than the seat-back dial-in approach. However, it offers only limited, preloaded Web browsing, and you can't use it for corporate, America Online, or Web-based e-mail such as Hotmail or Yahoo (yet). And for now, it's available only on a handful of airlines.

Tenzing installs a local area network on each plane that connects passengers to an onboard server, which in turn communicates to the ground via radio. The type of LAN varies between airlines. Cathay Pacific has installed USB ports in its seats, while SAS is experimenting with an 802.11b wireless network.

E-Mailing Over Canada

PCWorld.com tested the service on Air Canada, which is in trials with a LAN that you access by running a standard telephone cord from your laptop's modem to the data port of the seat-back phone, for a 56-kbps connection. You gain access by running an application you can download ahead of time from Tenzing's Web site (or install from a CD-ROM in a kit on the airplane). Alternatively, you can create a standard dial-up networking connection.

Once connected, you run your standard POP3-compliant e-mail program--no settings changes required. Requests to send and receive e-mail are intercepted by the onboard server, which retrieves your mail from your ISP's servers on the ground. It runs at the same pokey 10 kbps that makes dial-up connections via seat-back phones so frustrating. Tenzing doesn't speed up that link, but it makes the wait less annoying.

It Just Feels Faster

When you first request your mail, the onboard server sends a message advising you to compose your outgoing messages and then check back in several minutes. During that time the onboard server slowly retrieves the mail from your ISP. When you check again, the mail transfers from the server to your laptop at the zippier 56-kbps speed supported by the plane's onboard LAN. Total download time may be the same, but at least you're not watching the mail trickle in. In my test on a Los Angeles-Toronto flight, I sent a message to a cousin in Geneva, and received a response about 15 minutes later.

Also, the Tenzing server doesn't automatically retrieve long messages and file attachments (the size limit was 75KB on Air Canada, but can vary among airlines). Instead it notifies you of such oversize messages and lets you go back to retrieve them if necessary. Since Tenzing's fees are based on bandwidth usage, waiting until you're earthbound to view large files, such as images, can save money as well as time.

Tenzing's pricing structure hadn't been finalized at this writing, but the company estimates you'll pay $10 to $20 to download up to 500KB of mail (and send a similar quantity) during a day's travel (including all connecting flights that offer the service). The 45 messages I downloaded in my tests took up a total of 182KB.

Limited Web Access

Paying e-mail customers can also do some very limited Web browsing, basically of pages from Tenzing's partner sites that are edited to remove ads and nonactive links, and are then cached on the server prior to flight time. Tenzing updates a couple of news headline pages during the flight.

In addition to Cathay Pacific and the Air Canada and SAS trials, Tenzing's announced customers include Singapore Airlines and Virgin Atlantic, which intends to offer the service to all of its customers by the end of the year.

So far no major U.S. airlines have announced plans for in-flight Internet access, but that could change with the planned introduction of faster air-to-ground radio communications that would permit full-blown, real-time, live Internet access. Boeing says it's talking to about 30 airlines worldwide about Connexion by Boeing, a satellite-based broadband service slated for a 2001 commercial-airline rollout. Tenzing says that when the new fast air-to-ground communications are ready, it can upgrade existing installations by simply swapping out the radios in current systems.

But Forrester Research senior analyst Henry Harteveldt says an explosion of fast in-flight Internet access isn't likely anytime soon. He cites the changing technology and the industry's historically cautious attitude towards new technology.

"A few years down the road, in-flight e-mail and Web access and entertainment could be very popular if it's priced right," Harteveldt says. "But it will be a rough year or two as they get things launched."