Wave Issue 0106 2/2/01 Article 5-02

***SAS, Telia to Test In-Flight Wireless Internet Access
(February 1)

According to Network World, Scandinavian Airlines System
announced that it will start testing wireless Internet access on
board aircraft by year-end. The Stockholm airline consortium is
working with Swedish telecom operator Telia and remote access
specialist Tenzing Communications to develop an in-flight
Internet access service based on IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN
technology.

Telia already offers a subscription-based wireless Internet
service in airports and hotels across Sweden under the Home Run
brand. The service enables subscribers to connect to the Internet
from hotel rooms and airport lounges from laptop computers using
an IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN PC Card, for a monthly fee of $157.

The company is negotiating with airport authorities in other
Nordic countries, and with foreign partners at airports in other
nations, to extend the service to travelers worldwide. The next
step is to extend the service into the aircraft, so travelers
have access to their e-mail from one end of their journey to the
other.

SAS will install a trial system to do just that on one of its 13
Boeing 767s in the last quarter of this year, but won't give an
exact date due to the testing being done on the ground. The in-
cabin system will use a standard IEEE 802.11b wireless networking
base station, repackaged to aircraft standards, but passengers
will be able to log on using off-the-shelf PC cards.

SAS passengers will be able to pick up Internet e-mail from their
usual POP3 mailbox, and also will be able to access a limited
range of travel-related Web sites, cached on an on-board server
and regularly updated over a satellite data link using Inmarsat
Holdings Ltd.'s Aero-H service. The caching is necessary because,
although the in-flight LAN will carry data at rates up to 11M
bit/sec, the WAN connection to the Internet will for now have a
capacity of just 2.4K bit/sec.

The caching system, developed by Tenzing, was tested in the air
for the first time in late January on six Boeing 767s operated by
Air Canada. Air Canada is using Tenzing's caching servers to
offer a wired in-flight Web and e-mail service to executive-class
passengers on long-haul flights across Canada. Tenzing's system
caches not only Web content, but also e-mail messages, queuing
them for sending and reception.