The Importance of American's Wi-Fi Announcement

(MoneyWatch)  Yesterday, my BNET Travel colleague Bryan Corliss covered American's decision to put wireless Internet access on the bulk of its domestic fleet. It's clearly good news for passengers and for Aircell, the provider of the service, but there's something even more important here. This is the first true validation of the wi-fi model.

Look at all the other airlines that have installed wireless Internet so far. United, Alaska, and Southwest all have tests in progress or being planned but nothing more substantial as of yet. Virgin America and Delta have both committed to outfitting most of their domestic fleet, but those decisions weren't based on any test at all. That was just a product decision for both airlines that was made without internal data to review.

American, on the other hand, has been running wireless Internet on its 767-200 fleet across the country for several months. They have a ton of data showing usage rates, reliability, etc. And with that data in hand, they've decided that it's a sound idea to roll this out nearly fleet-wide (domestically).

This is a tremendous validation of the model that Aircell has put forward, and it tells me that other airlines will need to start playing catch up quickly. This may be a frill right now, but if American is truly seeing success and making analytics-based decisions (as they're known to do), then we'll probably see this on nearly every carrier within a couple years.