Wired IT
TechBiz: IT

It's about friggin' time. That's what you'll say to yourself at some point in the next few months when you realize you can finally surf the Web from seat 17C. Alaska, American, Southwest, and Virgin America all plan to roll out airborne Wi-Fi this summer. The price to you: about $6 to $13 a flight. The services will work in one of two ways — Southwest and Alaska are using satellite-based broadband from Row 44, a California company, while American and Virgin are opting for a cell phone tower system from Aircell in Illinois. Cell towers? Yep, turns out cell signals don't necessarily interfere with instrumentation — you can't use mobile phones on planes because they cause network headaches and annoy fellow passengers. Here's how Vi@gra spam and photos of grammatically challenged cats will find you on the red-eye.

... Via Cell Tower (Aircell) Data is transmitted over a patchwork of 92 existing cell towers covering the continental US. Because there's nothing blocking the signal, each tower offers a coverage radius of up to 250 miles. The downsides: a paltry (buffering ... buffering ...) 3-Mbps throughput for each plane. Plus the cost to passengers is $12.95 per flight — more than Row 44's service — and at launch the system will work only in the lower 48.

... Via Satellite (Row 44) Signals are beamed from geosynchronous satellites orbiting 22,500 miles up. The data rate is roughly 30 Mbps per plane (expect low-end DSL speeds once a few dozen passengers log on), and the system works across international borders and over oceans (though it will be available only in North America at first). And even though it costs the airlines more than Aircell's system to install, passengers pay less — as little as $6 per flight.

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Five years ago, if Hewlett-Packard bought EDS, everyone would've thought it was pretty much like when IBM bought PwC -- a play to create a powerful data processing consulting business that could coexist with a computer hardware business. In fact, that's been a great model for IBM.

But with HP today buying EDS for $12 billion, the smart thinking goes in a different direction. It's looking like a red-hot area going forward for IBM, Amazon and Google will be so-called cloud computing -- a.k.a. hardware as a service.

If you're a startup or a corporate IT manager, you increasingly won't have to buy computers to run your business. You just rent capabilities from some computing giant and move the information there and back over the internet. If something crashes, the data is always backed up and stored somewhere out there in the cloud. This is the ubiquitous computing idea IBM has pushed for a decade -- making computer power something like electric power.

If you tack together some of HP's other purchases under CEO Mark Hurd -- as Om Malik did -- it seems even more obvious that HP is at least as interested in cloud computing as consulting. And EDS is a solid cloud-computing play because a core business is owning and running giant data centers.

As part of the interview I did with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (the video is now on Portfolio.com), we discussed Amazon's push into cloud computing.

"We've been working on our Infrastructure Web Services for four years," Bezos said. "We launched our first one two years ago, the Simple Storage Service, and I am astonished -- I rarely meet a startup company these days who isn't using our web services and now we're starting to get, you know, deployment inside Enterprise level data centers as well. So it's a very exciting."

Asked about Google's plans to get into a similar business, Bezos said: "Well ... we really do have a practice of not talking about other companies. But this, like our retail business, (there) is not going to be one winner. I think there are going to be multiple winners pursuing different flavors or strategies, different kinds of products.... I think our web services business is going to be part of what becomes an important industry. And ... important industries are rarely made by single companies."

So maybe there is room for HP, Amazon, IBM, Google and others to play in the cloud computing space. The HP deal is telling us that the concept is ready for prime time.