Back in August, AirAsia announced that it has successfully tested out inflight Wi-Fi connectivity service and has planned to offer it to consumers within this year. True to its promise, the new service which is called roKKi Chats is now ready for AirAsia passengers.
Before you get too excited though, roKKi Chats is unlike your usual Wi-Fi hotspot service since it only supports selected instant messaging services such as Line, WhatsApp, and WeChat. In another words, you can’t actually surf the Internet, check your e-mails, or share photos of Pak Nasser’s Nasi Lemak to Instagram or play Counter-Strike with your mates on-board AirAsia flights that are equipped with roKKi Chats.
With the ability to support up to 90 passengers at a time, the service will go live once the aircraft reaches 10,000 feet above sea level but will be deactivated when the flight goes through restricted airspace in India, China and Macau. roKKi Chats is apparently able to deliver a maximum speed of 1.33Mbps although that speed will be throttled down to 10Kbps once users hit the service’s 3MB data quota.
Before passengers are able to connect to roKKi Chats, they first need to purchase a token from a flight attendant which is priced at RM 8 although at the moment it is being sold at a promotional price of RM 5. The service is currently available in four aircraft with 16 more to be equipped with it by the end of this year before being expanded to the rest of AirAsia’s fleet by the second quarter of 2015.
However, it is not available for AirAsia X flights at the moment. To learn more about roKKi Chats, check out this helpful FAQ at AirAsia.com.
