UK researcher house Juniper believes that more than half the world’s commercial aviation fleet will be equipped with inflight wifi by 2022.

It estimates that currently one-in-four planes allow passengers to log in at 30,000 feet.

Juniper adds that “monthly inflight entertainment revenues are forecast to rise by 30% on average per aircraft over the forecast period”

The headline figures above are taken from some paid-for research, while the press release doesn’t go into how, exactly, airlines can generate inflight entertainment revenues. In a BYOD world, the obvious revenue stream would be charging for access.

Downloading content is likely to be more popular on long-haul routes than short-haul, and this is one of the issues airlines and the inflight wifi system providers have to face – what happens to the bandwidth if everyone on a 12-hour flight wants to download a box-set at the same time?

Qantas plans to have inflight wifi rolled out across its entire domestic fleet – some 80 aircraft – by late-2018.

As the inflight wifi sector matures, it will be interesting to compare and contrast how the world’s airlines attempt to monetize the service.

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