Leading Airlines Wifi Project, by Jesús Espinoza @jesu_edu

Since the creation of the magnificent tool “the internet” in 1980, people have grown to be more internet-dependent throughout the years. Now, in 2015, this massive and helpful tool is in the very hand of anyone who wants to get online, whereas back in the 80´s only very selected people had access to it. Nowadays, the dependency of always being connected has ridiculously increased.

As a starting point, this increasing dependency to the internet is arriving to entrepreneurs’ minds in every company. This specific thought is being translated to future revenues and attracting internet- hungry customers in the short haul market.

The first sector to let the market know about its interest on this opportunity was the airport. Airline customers already have the chance to get access to Wi-Fi on ¾ of the miles flown, according to data generated by Routehappy, a company which rates flights worldwide on facilities such as entertainment and seats.

In perspective, almost all of the long haul flights have Wi-Fi provided by satellite-based services, which is costly but acceptable for this kind of flights; however, if you were to hypothetically translate the same structure of Wi-Fi services to short haul flights, the mechanic wouldn't be affordable. The cost would increase and it would be greater than the income.

Despite this, the airlines do not lose the expectations of creating a short haul Wi-Fi system on their airplanes due to the fact that the world market will send up more satellites, bringing costs down, and to the rising awareness of money-making possibilities so that money will be no longer a hurdle.

Several European airlines are looking at on-board Wi-Fi on short- haul flights, such as Lufthansa , Air France-KLM , Ryanair and Vueling.

According to the airline market's view, in a few years we will be living all this information about Wi-Fi services in every plane we get on to, there won’t be a difference between a short or a long haul flight. In addition to this, the service will be offered free of charge in specific planes, and as a return the airport sector will be more than excited about getting millions of dollars reflected on entertainment revenues.