Free onboard WiFi has become the latest battleground between the world’s leading airlines as the once expensive and unreliable service finally delivers quality comparable to being at home.

Delta, United, Japan Airlines, Air France and other global carriers have in recent weeks sought to outdo each other with competing announcements about the arrival or extension of onboard connectivity.

And in sharp contrast to the growing practice of charging passengers for services that were once included in the ticket price – such as checking bags or selecting seats – the airlines are mostly promising that their high-speed WiFi is free.

Fabien Pelous, head of client experience at Air France, said the airline's plan to introduce free WiFi in 2025 will be a qualitative jump for clients, admitting that the service up to now "was not satisfactory".

"We looked at the state of the market, and there are new players, including Starlink, whose latest technologies offer internet quality which is almost equivalent to being at home," Pelous told AFP.

The first experiments began in 2004 with Boeing and Lufthansa, and since then companies such as ViaSat, Panasonic and Thales have developed products that now equip hundreds of planes.

Low-orbit satellite constellations such as Starlink were "a game changer", said Seth Miller, owner of PaxEx, a website that covers business travel.

Elon Musk's Starlink already outfits planes of Hawaiian Airlines and US domestic carrier JSX.

While classic telecommunication satellites orbit as high as 35,000 kilometres from earth, constellation satellites are at just 600 kilometres altitude, greatly reducing latency and allowing for video streaming.

"We will no longer be dependent on the movie choices of airlines, we'll be able to access Amazon Prime or Netflix," said Paul Chiambaretto, professor of marketing strategy at Montpellier Business School.

And for the carriers, "not just making it free, but also making sure it's a good solution, is sort of the Holy Grail" in terms of client satisfaction and loyalty, said PaxEx's Miller.

How ‘free’?

However, "free" may be relative, said Joe Leader, director general of the Airline Passenger Experience Association.

Delta, United and Air France are only offering free high-speed WiFi to members of their loyalty programmes. Signing up costs nothing, but the WiFi offer provides new marketing opportunities.

"Our friends at Delta (have) publicly stated that for every eight new sign-ups for the Delta SkyMiles programme, one of those passengers will get the Delta SkyMiles credit card," Leader said.

"Effectively, the addition of eight pieces of data and then one new paying customer that gets really brought into the Delta loyalty programme via the credit card more than pays for the WiFi for the other seven passengers."

As some clients may prefer to not sign up, Apex advises airlines to continue offering paying alternatives for passengers who may not want to share their data in exchange for being connected.

For Air France, installing Starlink's WiFi on more than 220 planes will take time and will cost "tens of millions of euros", said Pelous, but aligns with its positioning as a high-end carrier.

"I am convinced that in three to four years, no one will understand that once we did not have acceptable connections aboard planes," he said.

Cabin decorum

Onboard broadband presents new challenges for airlines and flight attendants, who already have to cope with sometimes unruly passengers.

"We don't want to spend 12 hours of a transoceanic flight next to someone on Skype," said Chiambaretto. "And then there are also many passengers who are very happy to be disconnected during a flight."

Leader agrees that airlines need to find the right balance.

They “need to make sure that we maintain etiquette and decorum in the sky rather than letting it become a new Wild West of connectivity and talking”, he said. – AFP