With the announcement a couple weeks ago that Southwest has finally set a date for the testing of their in-flight Internet connectivity it seems that the majority of the US-based carriers have something in the works.  Runway Girl has a couple good posts (Post 1; Post 2) about the various options, but I haven’t been able to find an exhaustive list of all the offerings from all the carriers.  So I decided to put one together.  Here are the airlines, the service and the status of the deployment efforts:

  • American Airlines - Aircell’s gogo service currently operational on 767s for NYC-LAX/SFO/MIA routes.
  • Alaska Air - Row 44, currently planned for testing on a single plane.
  • Jet Blue - LiveTV, but only on one plane and no word on when additional rollout will happen.
  • Continental - LiveTV on the entire domestic-focused fleet, starting in January ‘09
  • Delta - Aircell’s gogo service, expected on the MD8x planes first and on the entire fleet by mid-2009
  • Frontier - Likely LiveTV since they already use the service for television on the planes, but I haven’t seen an official release.
  • United - Nothing planned/announced
  • US Airways - Nothing planned/announced, though back in February they said they were looking at it.  The fact that they are pulling the entertainment systems to save weight makes me suspect of their ability to actually get it into their planes soon, particularly since they have nothing specific announced, but they supposedly are looking at it.
  • Southwest - Row 44, currently planned for testing in Q4 ‘08
  • Virgin America - Aircell’s gogo service coming soon and will be fleet-wide.

The Aircell and LiveTV services are both terrestrial, which Row 44 is a satellite-based solution.  Row 44 and Aircell’s gogo are both supposed to be “full” Internet service while LiveTV is very up front about the fact that they are providing access to a very limited subset of the internet, and they’ve increased the content available recently.

Hopefully this helps (and I didn’t mess up the details too much).  If I did, I’m sure you’ll let me know.