On Monday, United Airlines and Verizon trumpeted an announcement that they’d inked a deal and received FAA certification to provide in-flight wi-fi. Searchviews has a good overview, as does this Associated Press wire story. The announcement was fairly widely reported - I saw it in both the WSJ and USA Today - and also it cropped up in dozens of other places. But what, really, is UAL’s news?

On looking at the actual press release, several things stand out. For one thing, Verizon doesn’t actually even own the spectrum yet that it would use to deliver a broadband signal to a plane. In fact, that spectrum auction hasn’t even occurred yet and no date for it is set. Still more pertinently, the signal would be ground-to-air. Also, I wondered that the release quote comes from a marketing vice president. Granted, marketing at UAL would have to be closely involved with this operation to make the most of it. However, as a saucy piece of technology-innovation news and as a partnership with annother massive brand (Verizon), it would seem as though a member of the executive suite might have been designated spokesperson.

All that HAS happened is that UAL has demonstrated to the FAA that an in-board wi-fi signal doesn’t interfere with airplane navigation - on ONE airplane model. It hasn’t market-demonstrated in-flight broadband to passengers. And it won’t be able to provide international flyers with the service.

Why does this pique CoFactors’ interest? Mostly because, amusement at Verizon and UAL’s opportunistic communications aside, we’re very well acquainted with the amazing variety of usability issues associated with putting broadband into an airplane. And we suspect that if Verizon was as well informed as Boeing, which operates Connexion By Boeing, the only existing provider of actual in-flight broadband (this is what powers the system in use by Lufthansa), they might not have quoted a 2006 launch date in some of the media coverage. Full disclosure: CBB is a client. And while we can’t specify details of our usability testing work with them, we can say that creating an interface that meets standard-traveler needs in flight is no small proposition. Separately, we wonder if the ground-to-air approach will actually work as well as CBB’s satellite system - but that question gets above our pay grade.

In any event, we’ll watch the UAL/Verizon partnership with great interest.

JF

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 8th, 2005 at 4:55 pm and is filed under General, Usability, Usability Testing.