Hours and hours of flight without the possibility of opening Facebook, writing a message on WhatsApp, checking emails. A nightmare for the millions of passengers who take a plane to travel on national or continental routes that begins when the cabin crew orders them to activate the much hated "airplane mode".
But there is good news. Starting this summer, the UK satellite operator, Inmarsat will launch theEuropean Aviation Network (Ean), a service created specifically for aircraft thanks to which European travelers will be able to connect to the internet with a speed equal to home broadband on a fixed line. Which by the way has been happening for some time in the United States, especially on the long haul.
Obviously, after the good news comes the bad news, because according to what was written by Financial Times, the service will be paid and, according to the calculations of the London School of Economics, it will make it possible to collect as much as 130 billion dollars by 2035. But the profit will not only come from the travelers who decide to use it, but also from the advertising spaces.
The Inmarsat project comes in collaboration with Deutsche Telekom, which will take care of the construction of a network of three hundred transceivers in thirty European countries, and Nokia, which instead will work on special repeaters capable of guaranteeing a stable signal even at high altitudes.
In short, in a few months, the suffering of those who don't know how to spend the hours on a plane and feel lost without the internet will finally end. And as it happens on the "earth" even in European skies we will see our neighbors attached to their smartphones. normal administration.
