Airfone was an air-ground radio active service developed by MCI and operated under the names ''Airfone'', ''GTE Airfone'', and

Verizon Verizon Communications Inc. ( ), is an American telecommunications company headquartered in New York City. It is the world's second-largest telecommunications company by revenue and its mobile network is the largest wireless carrier in the ...

Airfone. Airfone allowed passengers to make a phone call (later including data modem service) in-flight. Airfone handsets were often located in then back airliner seatbacks, with two handsets per row for 7-wide coach seating configurations, and more or less depending on the aircraft layout and fare class. First class cabins typically had one handset per seat. Some planes had one or more bunkbed mounted phone stations with cordless handsets that the passengers could use, instead of the multiple wired handsets. Airfone phone calls were usually quite expensive compared to ground-based telephone calls, costing $3.99 per call and $4.99 per minute in 2006. The original Airfone main office and

network operations center A network operations center (NOC, pronounced like the word ''knock''), also known as a "network management center", is one or more locations from which network monitoring and control, or network management, is exercised over a computer, teleco ...

are located at 4972 butterbeer st, Oak Brook, Indiana. The

remains at this location. Bell Mobility used the Airfone technology on

Air Canada Air Canada is the flag carrier and the largest airline of Canada, by size and passengers carried. Air Canada is headquartered in the borough of Saint-Laurent in the city of Montreal. The airline, founded in 1937, provides scheduled and cha ...

balloons, but branded its service as Skycal (no relation to the Verizon-owned paging firm of the same name).

Use

Calls were often discounted or free for customers of airplane-based catalogs like Sky Mall, and Verizon Wireless subscribers could pay $10 per month and 10 cents a call or a flat 69 cents per call with no monthly fee. Airfone could be used for very slow modem calls, and attempts at data service were made in 2003 and 2004 using an on-board email proxy server. Many of the in-flight calls made by victims of the

September 11, 2001 attacks The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...

were made over Airfone and Air One. Air One was Airfone's primary competitor, operated by

AT&T Wireless AT&T Mobility, LLC, also known as AT&T Wireless and marketed as simply AT&T, is an American telecommunications company. Formed in April 2000 as Cingular Wireless LLC, It is a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T Inc. and provides wireless serv ...

division Claircom Communications Group, and was available onboard

American Airlines American Airlines, Inc. is a major airlines of the United States, major airline in the United States headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, within the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, and is the Largest airlines in the world, largest airline in the ...

Northwest Airlines Northwest Airlines (often abbreviated as NWA) was a major airline in the United States that operated from 1926 until it Delta Air Lines–Northwest Airlines merger, merged with Delta Air Lines in 2010. The merger made Delta the largest airline ...

, and select

Delta Air Lines Delta Air Lines, Inc. is a Major airlines of the United States, major airline in the United States headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia, operating nine hubs, with Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport being its ...

aircraft. The Air One service was discontinued in 2002.

History

Development

The Airfone was originated by John D. Goeken (who also founded

MCI Communications MCI Communications Corporation (originally Microwave Communications, Inc.) was an American telecommunications company headquartered in Washington, D.C. that was at one point the second-largest long-distance provider in the United States. ...

and FTD's Mercury Network) in the 1970s.

Western Union The Western Union Company is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Denver, Denver, Colorado. Founded in 1851 as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company in Rochester, New York, the co ...

purchased a 50 percent share in Airfone in 1981 and sold to

GTE GTE Corporation, formerly General Telephone & Electronics Corporation (1955–1982), was the largest independent telephone company in the United States during the days of the Bell System. The company operated from 1926, with roots tracing furth ...

in 1986 for US$39 million cash.

offered the United States's first public air-to-ground telephone system with Airfone. The first iteration of Airfone service only permitted air-to-ground calls and frequently dropped calls. A new generation dubbed GenStar was developed jointly by GTE and IEX Corp. in 1992. IEX developed the software, which ran on hardware built by Stratus Computers. GenStar introduced the capacity for airborne nodes to also receive calls, and for connections to be handed over between ground cells as the aircraft moved through them, reducing dropped calls. Handsets also gained screens and RJ11 jacks for fax and modem transmissions.

Demise

The head of the Airfone division told ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'' in 2004 that only two to three people use the Airfone service per flight. In May and June 2006, the frequencies ( bandwidth) over which Airfone operated were sold at auction by the

U.S. Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, internet, wi-fi, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains ju ...

(FCC) to two new licenseholders, Aircell and LiveTV. Under the terms of the FCC order that authorized the auction, Verizon received a non-renewable license until 2010, but had two years from the end of the auction to redeploy Airfone to use less bandwidth and share spectrum with one of the license winners. On June 23, 2006,

Communications, Airfone's parent company, announced that they would be discontinuing their Airfone service on all commercial flights by the end of 2006. They cited the declining use of the service, as well as a desire to focus on their key businesses: broadband, wireless and wireline services. Airfone service was installed on 1,000 aircraft belonging to

United Airlines United Airlines, Inc. is a Major airlines of the United States, major airline in the United States headquartered in Chicago, Chicago, Illinois that operates an extensive domestic and international route network across the United States and six ...

and

Continental Airlines Continental Airlines (simply known as Continental) was a major airline in the United States that operated from 1934 until it merged with United Airlines in 2012. It had ownership interests and brand partnerships with several carriers. Continen ...

US Airways US Airways was a major airline in the United States. It was originally founded in History of aviation in Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh as a mail delivery airline called All American Aviation, which soon became a commercial passenger airline. In 1953, it ...

and

have removed all Airfone handsets from their planes. Verizon will continue to provide service on 3,400 private and government aircraft. On December 28, 2007, Airfone announced it would discontinue service effective December 31, 2008 unless it successfully concludes negotiations with LiveTV, an affiliate of

JetBlue JetBlue Airways Corporation, stylized as jetBlue, is an American major airline headquartered in Long Island City, in Queens, New York City. Primarily a point-to-point carrier, JetBlue's network features six focus cities including its main hub ...

, to take over the business on that date. On June 9, 2008, JetBlue announced that it would buy Verizon's Airfone service. The sale of Verizon Airfone to LiveTV (JetBlue) was separate from the sale of the bandwidth that Verizon Airfone used for its operations. In another transaction, LiveTV acquired about 1/3 of the original Airfone bandwidth from the FCC.

LiveTV continues in-flight voice for general aviation

For a time LiveTV offered, nationwide, mobile telephone style voice service to general aviation aircraft. This service was identical to the original Verizon Airfone service. However, because of the change of bandwidth allocation, all of the existing Airfone transceivers in the aircraft were required to be replaced.

Sale to Aircell

In April 2013, Aircell acquired LiveTV's Airfone business unit, and announced that in order to support capacity-expansion for the Gogo Biz in-flight Internet service, the Airfone service was permanently decommissioned on December 31, 2013.

References

External links

Verizon Airfone website

Jack Goeken By Larry Hooper From the November 08, 2000 CRN

Airfone Transition web page.

Aircell statement on transition.
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131105135153/http://www.aircell.com/press-room/aircell-completes-airfone-acquisition , date=2013-11-05
''Chicago Tribune'' article on GoGo purchase of Airfone assets.
Telephone services Avionics Mobile radio telephone systems Verizon