Alaska Airlines is the latest carrier to launch in-flight Wi-Fi, offering passengers on a specially equipped Boeing 737 a service that uses satellites instead of cellular towers to connect the plane to the Internet.

Like other airlines, Alaska won't let passengers talk over VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) while in flight. They are invited to surf the Web, send and receive e-mail and instant messages, access games and multimedia content and use corporate VPNs (virtual private networks). Users can access the network with any Wi-Fi device, including phones and portable media players. They will get an opening Web page with news, music, shopping and links to services on the airline's homepage.

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So much Internet, so many wireless ways to get it: A battle is intensifying over which methods will dominate, and the outcome could determine how people surf the Web for years to come.

One method for cable-free navigation - connecting through a cellular phone network - got a boost two weeks ago when a group of companies and the GSM Association, an industry lobby, promised to spend $1 billion to market a new initiative to make laptop computers wireless-ready without using Wi-Fi technology.

The latest graphics cards have been used to break Wi-Fi encryption far quicker than was previously possible. Some security consultants are already suggesting the development blows Wi-Fi security out of the water and that corporations ought to apply tighter VPN controls, or abandon wireless networks altogether, in response.

Russian firm ElcomSoft has applied GPU acceleration technology to its password recovery tool to allow PCs or servers running supported NVIDIA video cards to break Wi-Fi encryption up to 100 times faster than is possible by using conventional microprocessors. Recovery times for Wi-Fi keys are increased by a factor between 10 to 15 in the use of Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery in combination with a regular laptop featuring NVIDIA GeForce 8800M or 9800M series GPUs.