GENEVA-Airbus and SITA have formed a joint venture called On Air with the goal of making mobile-phone services available to passengers during air travel.
On Air said the system would let passengers use their phones and other wireless access devices, including laptops, in-flight as they normally would on the ground. The service is expected sometime after 2006.
The GSM-based service turns an airplane into a mobile base station and has been successfully tested in-flight according to the venture; a similar solution will also be developed for Boeing.
“We estimate that the number of passengers in the addressable market for onboard GSM telephony will be over 700 million by 2009,” said SITA Managing Director Francesco Violante.
