The ‘Broadband in the Sky’ concept is finding its way to India. Early next year, passengers aboard planes of several Indian carriers will be able to access the Internet to surf, chat and watch television on a broadband connection, reports The Financial Express.
India’s private carriers including Kingfisher Airlines, a JetBlue clone; and other fast growing carriers such as Jet Airways and Air Sahara, plans to provide Internet connectivity at 35,000 feet. The state-owned carriers Air India and Indian Airlines are going to offer these services.
“We plan to offer Connexion, Boeing’s real-time, high-speed Internet and data communications service,” said Jitender Bhargava, Air India’s Executive Director. Kingfisher Airlines has announced plans to have live television on its flights by next March. Its fleet of Airbus A320s will be fitted with a satellite dish and live television will be available at every seat.
That’s good news for Connexion, which the WSJ has reported has done poorly, and could have cost Boeing as much as a $1 billion. But one problem is that U.S. carriers reportedly didn’t show as much interest as Boeing expected, and the new Indian customers might not be enough to keep Connexion within Boeing’s longterm plans.
In India it’s a different story. India is currently going through an aviation boom, much like the one we say in the late 1950s and 1960s in the US. According to the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, domestic market in India will add five million passengers every year for the next five years, with the overall market ballooning to about 45 million passengers by 2010.
It is certainly a large enough market. It is ironic that these moves are coming at a time when the entire nation is starved for bandwidth. It is causing enough concern that even the slow moving Department of Telecommunications is thinking about cutting bandwidth prices by 30-to-40%.
The telecom regulator recently informed the department that bandwidth prices in India were high because the country didn’t allow equal access at cable landing stations for new companies.
DoT is mulling over plans to open landing stations of international long distance companies to rival providers’ submarine cables and regulate access charges for the cables, The Financial Express reports. This would boost new entrants’ business and could lead to a 30-40 percent cut in bandwidth costs.
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