October 18, 1999 Web posted at: 11:08 a.m. EDT (1508 GMT) by Mary Lisbeth D'Amico

From...

(IDG) -- In the not-too-distant future, airline passengers will be able to access the Internet as they cruise the friendly skies.

Inmarsat, a London satellite operations company, last week announced it has developed an inflight system that will let passengers and crew send and receive data at transmission rates of up to 64K bit/sec. The system is actually an upgrade of already existing services on airplanes that enable passengers to make a phone call from their seats, according to Lindsay Norrish, manager of aeronautical safety services with Inmarsat.

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To use the airline network, passengers will plug in their laptops into a modem outlet at their seats that will link them to an onboard server, Norrish says. A satellite transmitter on the airplane transmits the signal to one of Inmarsat's nine geostationary satellites, where it is beamed to earth to a land earth station (LES) operated by a service provider. The LES sends and receives communications through Inmarsat's satellites and provides the connection between the satellite system and fixed communications networks.

Inmarsat is already developing a similar system for ships, Norrish says. However, this was introduced separately because air travel presents specific technical obstacles - which he claims the company has overcome - for satellite-based communications.

"You can't put as large an antenna on a plane as a ship," he said. Another obstacle is the speed of the aircraft.

Working in partnerships with service providers, Inmarsat will market the service directly to commercial airlines and operators of corporate and government planes.

Inmarsat's satellite services are offered through some 100 service providers, and equipment manufacturers and distributors offer global sales and support, according to information on the company Web site.

BT Skyphone - developed by a consortium of British Telecommunications PLC, Telenor AS and Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. - has already signed up for the service, and plans to begin offering it in late 2000, Norrish says.