Scott Carson, CEO, Connexion

If anyone knows airplanes, it's Scott Carson. He's worked for Boeing for 35 years, starting out with a blue collar as a flightline technician, and moving up the ranks to head the finance operations of Boeing's commercial airliner business and its defense contracting company. But for the last few years Carson hasn't been dealing with fuselages and jet engines, he's been leading Boeing's much anticipated wireless venture, Connexion by Boeing. Its goal: bringing wireless data to the cabin and eliminating the tired phrase “please turn off all wireless devices for the duration of the flight” from the vocabulary of flight attendants.

The need is obvious: Where else would wireless be in critical demand but 37,000 feet above the earth's surface, trapped on a transoceanic flight between New York and London? However, reality dictated an indirect route for Connexion to reach this destination.

Connexion became airborne in October 2000 with high expectations. It spent most of its first year developing an in-cabin wireless LAN and a fuselage-mounted phased array antenna technology that linked with a geosynchronous satellite in orbit around the equator and transmitted data back to the terrestrial Internet. During 2001, Connexion ran successful trials on Lufthansa flights crossing the Atlantic. On Sept. 10, 2001, Connexion was set to sign its first commercial service deal. Needless to say, events of the following day changed everything.

“The airlines were more concerned about survival than introducing wireless data,” Carson said. “We had to hunker down.”

More like hibernate. Connexion didn't make a peep for two-and-a-half years, burrowing itself into research and development and attempting to survive a corporate shake-up at Boeing. But this year Connexion is ready to really fly. It has a new antenna technology that extends the reach of its service farther up the horizon, allowing satellites to maintain a 20 Mb/s link as far north and south as 75 degrees latitude (for example, roughly 350 miles north of Iceland in the northern hemisphere). Plus, Connexion has a new business plan. It's not just pushing Wi-Fi to consumers, it's reserving channels on its networks for possible future deals with television networks for live broadcast feeds and with the cellular companies who want to put microcells directly on board.

The first commercial flights carrying Connexion's new technology will take off this month. “We're going to know a lot more in a couple of months,” Carson said. “This has been one of the most challenging assignments of my career, but it's also been one of the most exciting. This is something entirely new.”