At a business luncheon in Melbourne yesterday, NBN Co CEO Bill Morrow said he had been in talks with Qantas and Virgin on the ‘possibility’ of both airlines finally being able to offer inflight Internet to passengers, according to the Herald Sun. 

It has been around for a long time in the US and other parts of the world, although the recent case of a passenger being seriously overcharged would be making all inflight Wi-Fi users want to closely check the included amount of data and the terms and conditions. 

Even so, those problems would hopefully not pertain to Australians, as we would be using two NBN satellites due to launch next year to deliver 12Mbps download speeds and 1Mbps upload speeds. 

If everyone on the plane was using and was paying for inflight Internet, that connection could get saturated fast, but the reality is that most passengers wouldn’t be paying for the service just yet, even though over time, Internet in the sky will eventually be as cheap, commonplace and expected without a second thought as it is here down on the ground. 

Being able to access the Internet in the sky is a very cool thing, you can chat with people on IM or send emails, watch YouTube videos, even make VoIP calls. In the US you can pay a fixed price for inflight access on some airlines, but it hasn’t arrived in Australia as yet as we haven’t had the necessary satellites in space to deliver Internet directly to planes as they do in the Northern Hemisphere. 

So, let’s hope the talks accelerate and it really does happen, it’s just a shame we might have to wait until the end of 2015 or sometime in 2016 first.

You can read a lot more about Australian inflight Internet news and trials which never took off in my longer article, here.