Inmarsat to launch airborne internet service.

EUROPEMEDIA-(C)2002 Van Dusseldorp & Partners - http://www.vandusseldorp.com/

Inmarsat, the British satellite communications firm, has announced it is to sell satellite bandwidth to airline passengers wanting high-speed internet access, e-mail and TV programmes on the plane.

The Swift64 service, which offers data speeds of up to 64Kbps, is to be offered to corporate jet owners in June and to commercial airliners by the end of the year, said Simon Tudge, an Inmarsat marketing manager.

Boeing and Tenzing Communications, a partial subsidiary of Airbus Industrie, are also understood to be pursuing interests in providing satellite internet or television on airplanes.

However, Inmarsat's is reportedly the first service to make use of antennas already installed on 4,000 commercial airliners and private jets that use Inmarsat for communications.

To use the service, airline carriers need to upgrade an aircraft's avionics and wire the plane with a computer network to provide an internet jack at each seat.

In most cases, passengers would connect their own laptop computers to the network. The network would then connect to a single onboard internet server that transmits and receives data via the plane's Inmarsat antenna.

Trudge said bandwidth would be provided to the aircraft at about $11-$15 (E12.50-E17) per minute, which could be resold to passengers at the carrier's discretion. ((Distributed via M2 Communications Ltd - http://www.m2.com))