
American Airlines Lawsuit Suggests It Too Thinks GoGo In-Flight Broadband Sucks - DiabloD3
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160216/11032733613/american-airlines-lawsuit-suggests-it-too-thinks-gogo-in-flight-broadband-sucks.shtml
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6stringmerc
Alternate Headline & TL;DR Summary:

Airline plans to use existing contract language to opt out of current service
provider in order to use alternate service provider.

Considering the source is TechDirt though, I'm not particularly surprised.

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mattzito
There's a much better analysis, to your point, here:

[http://viewfromthewing.boardingarea.com/2016/02/16/45332/](http://viewfromthewing.boardingarea.com/2016/02/16/45332/)

Apparently gogo _has_ a faster, better offering, so American could also just
be suing to get themselves a better position in line to get upgraded, or
preferred pricing on the faster service.

Or just to be able to switch, as you point out.

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randycupertino
It's 2016. Why isn't there free wifi on flights?? I mean, we don't have real
hoverboards and we don't have flying cars. Can't we just have this one small,
actually possible thing. ffs!

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JumpCrisscross
> Why isn't there free wifi on flights?

Currently, in-flight Wi-Fi hums along at 3 to 10 Mbps. For the whole cabin.
Pricing it at zero would slow it to a crawl. This is true for any rival good.

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Havoc
Well if they price it a bit more reasonably then that would work. Some of the
offers out there are truly mind boggling. I seem to recall a 10meg data cap as
the cheapest option I saw (15 usd or gbp).

200meg @ 5 GBP sounds more reasonable...enough to surf a decent bit but not
enough to affect overall speed.

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sethhochberg
At least flying domestic within the US, I've never seen in-flight wifi with
data caps.

They do, of course, restrict video streaming services so as to not let one
person consume the whole downlink, but that seems like a reasonable tradeoff
given the bandwidth limitations on satellite internet. Many airlines now have
onboard video-on-demand services anyways, which fills the streaming niche for
most people.

