

Why is it taking U.S. airlines so long to offer in-flight Wi-Fi? - danso
http://skift.com/2012/11/19/why-is-it-taking-u-s-airlines-so-long-to-offer-in-flight-wi-fi/

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joezydeco
So let's get the question clarified: Why don't cash-strapped US carriers take
their planes offline to add this expensive, FAA-certified equipment to their
aircraft?

And, once the equipment in installed, how do carriers make back that expense?
Do they give it away, hoping that customers will choose their airline over
others because it has wifi and not just on the cost of the seat as usual?
Every plane is already packed. Where do the gains come from?

The external antennas also add drag to the fuselage, which means more fuel to
burn and more money lost there. Who pays for that? Who convinces the flight
attendants to suddenly become tech support? They're busy rebooting the in-
flight entertainment systems three times per trip as it is.

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w1ntermute
I don't understand why the consumer airline industry is in a perpetual state
of bankruptcy. If the planes are "already packed", as you say, why don't they
just increase airfares to boost their profits?

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corin_
Because they are, for the most part, in a race to the bottom, and without
price-collusion any single airline raising their prices would see them lose
customers to their rivals.

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dllthomas
... to... their... already packed rivals?

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baldgeek
I work at the largest IFE vendor in the world, and I can tell you that current
satellite networking implementations would not be able to support a full
aircraft. So if they did offer it, they would have to price it very high to
keep an appropriate level of service.

I paid 30 Euros for 'net access on a lufthansa flight and only saw only 3
other people in the Economy cabin using it.

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StavrosK
Would you happen to know how they keep the antenna aimed at the satellite? Or
is it omnidirectional? I have no clue how it works.

~~~
trentmb
I think phased arrays might be used.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array>

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drusenko
This article is extremely misleading. Delta has 100% coverage for their own
fleet.

They do have a significant number of short-haul flights offered by affiliates
under the "Delta Connection" brand -- these are all very small planes where
you might have 30 minutes to use your laptop between reaching altitude and
starting descent. Even so, Delta is equipping these planes with wifi, too.

Someone isn't doing a good job of reading or understanding their data on
Delta, and that makes me question the rest of the conclusions...

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simulate
The U.S. currently has better coverage than Europe. Only a handful of carriers
are offering wifi in Europe. KLM, Air France are experimenting. Norwegian
offers wifi. Lufthansa offers wifi on transatlantic flights. The reason for
this is Gogo, who is providing nearly all the wifi in the U.S. Gogo has made
wifi relatively easy for U.S. carriers to adopt. There is nothing yet
equivalent to Gogo in Europe.

Separately, Gogo is expanding its in-flight bandwidth. I'm looking forward to
that. [http://thebat-sf.com/2012/11/13/gogo-to-upgrade-inflight-
wi-...](http://thebat-sf.com/2012/11/13/gogo-to-upgrade-inflight-wi-fi-
capacity)

~~~
khuey
Yeah, I'm quite surprised to hear people complain about the lack of inflight
wifi in the US. American carriers are pretty far ahead of carriers in other
countries on this.

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monksy
I can understand this being a priority on routes that take longer than 10
hours. But, whats wrong with working offline, or reading during that time? Its
not like you're going to be able to pull down large amounts of data, or view
realtime video.

~~~
apaprocki
That isn't true. I was on a Delta flight to JSConf in Portland in 2011 when
Osama bin Laden was killed and was watching it live as it was unfolding. Just
this week I was flying to/from LAX and was Citrix'd into work to deal with
some issues. I was getting roughly 300kbit up/down on the last trip. The whole
plane has about 3Mbps bandwidth.

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ShabbyDoo
Because I fly Southwest so much, I get free WiFi when available. Of my ten or
attempts at using it, I've had no connectivity at least three times. Of those,
perhaps five attempts resulted in connectivity so slow that it was only useful
for background email checking and painfully slow web browsing. The remaining
two "successful" uses had a 128K-ish downstream at best. Ping times (to
whatever www.google.com resolved to) were 500+ ms at best and multi-second at
worst. Periods of flakiness lasting a few minutes at a time were common. So,
unless I have some urgent usage requirement, I just stay offline to avoid the
hassle and anger.

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PaulHoule
Although I tend to check bags to not be a part of the "stuff the overheads
bin" battle on most flights, Wi-Fi is the only extra I'll pay for on a plane.
I've got no interest in stale food, alcohol, duty free, extra legroom or first
class.

However, I don't plan my itinerary on it. In particular, Delta is much more
likely to have Wi-Fi on the long hop from the hub to the west coast than
Usair, but Usair is much more able to find me return flights that aren't a
redeye... It took just one night looking at a Texas sky that was the color of
television static to decide I'd rather skip Wi-Fi than fly the redeye home.

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bravura
Question:

What service can I use to find inexpensive flights with flexible travel dates
(+-N days) and in-flight wifi?

kayak, my typical goto source for finding tickets, allows me to use flexible
dates to minimize my travel costs. I then buy the ticket direct from the
airline. It doesn't have wifi information, AFAIK.

routehappy, the site hyped by OP, allows you to sort by happiness and select
on features like wifi. However, it doesn't appear to allow flexible travel
dates, nor can you sort by price, or even see the price (!?).

What travel aggregator should I use?

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Goopplesoft
Try hipmunk.com, flexible +-2 day search or monthly search with wifi icons
next to flights offering it.

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sareon
When airlines don't allow you to use a kindle during take-off, but you can use
a read an actual book... it doesn't give much in terms of encouragement that
they are going to start offering free wifi.

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JimmaDaRustla
Cat6 is cheap nowadays!

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telecuda
This is Apple's opportunity to get involved. I love that I can iMessage from
my laptop while on Southwest WiFi. They need to extend it to the phone.

Idea #1: Picture there being two WiFi networks on a plane: Internet Access and
iMessage. Connect to iMessage from your iPhone/iPad, let Apple charge your
iTunes account if necessary, then conveniently text from your phone. Great for
the low-bandwidth situation they're limited by. [yes, you could pay using GoGo
etc from your mobile phone and do this, but few know about it and the UX
stinks]

Idea #2: Flight trackers as a landing page are nice, but get companies to pay
a buck or two to put their product or commercial on your connection page to
further subsidize the cost. Picture even a Google/Facebook ad model where you
could target your ad to the person's demographic based on their gender and DOB
from their frequent flier number.

Idea #3: For the love of God please do a better job throttling and/or blocking
bandwidth hogs until the tech is better. Some guy sitting next to me trying to
synch 20GB on Dropbox just doesn't seem good for the rest of the plane while
my Southwest connection is too slow to load Gmail.

