In-Flight Wi-Fi Still Costly, but More Available

After many years of halting starts and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, in-flight Wi-Fi is finally coming into its own, with 8,700 domestic flights, 38 percent of the total, now offering Internet connectivity, according to a report by Routehappy.com, a Web site that ranks tens of thousands of daily flights by quality of comfort and amenities. It remains to be seen, however, how viable in-flight Wi-Fi will be as a business — though Gogo, which leads the field with systems on more than 80 percent of all Wi-Fi-enabled flights in North America, had an initial public offering on June 21.

Gogo, which has its air-to-ground-based system in more than 1,900 airplanes flying domestically, plans to use proceeds of the stock offering partly to finance a planned international rollout using Ku-band satellite technology, which allows the service to work over oceans. That will enable the company to sell its services on overseas flights.