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Boeing Scraps In-flight Internet Access
Dreamwalkerofyore writes "According to the BBC, Boeing has recently announced that it has abandoned Connexion, its in-flight broadband service. Said Boeing CEO Jim McNerney: 'Regrettably, the market for this service has not materialized as had been expected. We believe this decision best balances the long-term interests of all parties with a stake in Connexion by Boeing.'"
Seeing as we won't be able to take our laptops or other gadgets on board aircraft for much longer.
If you can't bring your laptop on the flight, what did they expect!!? Psy Internet?.... Good going guys!! There is also no market for golf lessons on the flight either.
As evidenced by Sept. 11's Flight 93, cell phones work perfectly well at high altitudes. So as the broadband capability of these phones increases, it's obvious that dedicated services such as Connexion are targeting a redundant market.
I'm not sure if the reason isn't because of security issues. Which public airline wants their passengers to use notebooks during the flight in the times of exploding battery packs and terrorist attacks. Now as there is no mainstream market their Connexion system they abandon it because it's too expensive to carry on just for a small market of private airline carriers.
Pricing seems to have been not unreasonable
p ricing&lang=en
http://www.connexionbyboeing.com/index.cfm?p=cbb.
Internet Flight
Get flat-rate access for your entire flight.
$26.95 for entire flight, including connecting flights within 24 hours of signing in.*
Internet Time
Get 1, 2, or 3 hours of access. Internet Time begins when you sign in and counts down whether you are signed in or not.
Access Price
1 hour $9.95
2 hours $14.95
3 hours $17.95
*Price shown in US dollars. No taxes or duties will be added. Prices are reduced during maintenance periods.
I think I speak for all the _read between the fsckin lines_ people out there when I say:
This was probably done to prevent terrorists from using internet connections to coordinate another attack.
What? Did you think that the new snakes on a plane movie wasn't meant to scare as many people from flying close to the Sept. 11 date as possible, _just in case_?!
Please everyone, grab the nearest cluestick and rap yourself gently on the forehead. Sometimes telling people the truth causes more problems than it solves.
I think the real reason for their canning this was that they couldn't find the market for charging $50 for 5 minutes of broadband time on the flights!
You have to remember that anything in or around an airport costs as much as 2000 times its actual value. What made you think they wouldn't try this with broadband?
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
Who will I email for help when deadly snakes are released on my flight?
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Next they will ban passengers from flights.
Homeland.Sec: "People are responsible for causing all these crashes. After exhaustive investigation by FAA, we have concluded that presence of passengers on flights is 100% responsible for all these h1jackings. Henceforth, all passengers are banned from flights until further notice."
Oh and the $212 you paid for the flight ticket is NOT refundable.
Watch as this becomes a reality in 2007 once the Rep. party wins a thumping majority this year in Congress/Senate.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Honestly, you'd think the editors would be wiser than to post this story on today of all days, when Snakes on a Plane goes on general release. (Slashdot story yet?!) Maybe they were concerned about security --- trying to avoid worms on a plane and all that.
Using a cell phone on a plane would be incredibly dangerous to your health.
If you were sitting near me on a plane spouting corporate buzzwords or telling your hard of hearing relatives that "...yes! We're on the plane...", for hours on end, and if I have to hear the latest (and always truly inane and über-irritating) ring tone over and over, then trust me, you would be in terrible terrible terrible danger...
Damn those exploding laptops!
Of course, it does sound like the costs were out of control if they had 560 people working in what's a very small ISP.
Speaking personally, if i'm on a flight under 3 hours then by the time you've gone up, had a drink and got your food out of the way, you're getting ready to land again.
Flights that are 4-5 hours, I usually watch the film, read the book or (if i'm really inclined to do some work) I'll fire up my laptop and work on something offline.
Flights that are over 5 hours, I'll generally try and catch some sleep so that I'm refreshed when I get there.
As such, there is only small chance that i'll even think about using a laptop and, even then, the requirement for internet is limited. It doesn't surprise me that this venture is not particually sucessful.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Watching "Loose Change" while flying:
..priceless ;-)
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
Those prices might be bearable if the service worked. The real problem was that it didn't. I used it on Lufthansa. It was the worst laggy modem-speed mess, totally unusable. If you're paying by the hour for something, it's pretty infuriating when it stops working completely for five minutes at a time.
I suspect the real reason they weren't doing business was because of the performance, not the price.
the market for this service has not materialized as had been expected.
Translation: not nearly as many people are willing to get jacked for $35/hr for internet access as we had believed.
Though on a completely different angle, at the rate things are going now, soon we won't be able to get on a plane with anything short of our underwear, and will have to fed-ex our luggage to our destination. What happened to the good 'ol days when the people were more scared of the public than the government was?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The real reason? I couldn't use it very well even if I wanted to pay.
Given how US airlines pack you in like sardines, I can't open up my notebook larger than 60 degrees. That's not enough to see the display properly. The last thing I'm gonna do in this configuration is connect to the Internet.
During my trips to/from Europe, from/to the US, I always enjoyed this service on Lufthansa's airplanes. I wish they could keep it available, alongside allowance for laptops.
== With enough Will Power, one could move mountains. With enough Brains, one would just leave them where they are ==
I just pulled up a live chat with Connexion. For those that are interested the service is going to be terminated at the end of the year. (I'll be flying in September/October this year and it will still be operational)
Even though the new air travel rules say you can't bring computing equipment on board as carry-on, I'm certain they priced themselves right out of any chance of anyone buying the service. No one's going to pay $5/hour just to surf the 'Net.
My own personal belief is that 'Net access should start to become like electricity, gas, water, and other utilities and just as ubiquitous and accessible. If I go to a hotel, it should be free access, wired or wireless. The hotels that want to rape you for $10 a day or more need their heads examined. Sure, it's profitable, but I've selected hotels based solely on whether or not they provided free internet access.
Cellphones, of course, don't work on flights as a general rule. They only work on flights THAT PASS OVER LOTS OF CELL PHONE CELLS. The Pacific, the Gobi, the Sahara, and Greenland are all good examples of places not rich in cell phone cells.
Of course, if by 'plane travel' you unconsciously mean 'plane travel within the continental United States', then sure, you can just use your cell phone.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Are you kidding, as a network Administrator you wouldn't believe that calls we get about where people are trying to access their VPN or their webmail. Business class or First Class or Coach, there is a market there. Now more than ever it is harder for people to unplug, our need for always updating news and email or IM from friends and family is growing all the time. Boeing should forge ahead with the project, it could be bigger than they think. -W http://williehowe.homelinux.com/
Airlines love to advertise services like this or phones on planes when they first came out and then you discover that it's only slightly less expensive than a heroin habit. This is why airlines are winding down in flight phones - not because of cell phones or security but instead after the first few years of some yahoo calling "Woo Hoo guess what Cleetus I'm callin ya from tha plane!!!!!" the charm of a $40 phone call wears off.
Replying to my own message before I get going.
Most Slashdotters probably rarely check facts before they mod posts, so here's a link with the results of a bunch of well done tests, and feedback from people who work in the cell phone industry: http://www.physics911.net/projectachilles.htm
And here is the company that makes the cell site equipment for aircrafts: http://www.aircell.com/
I don't know about your laptops, but I have an HP 8000 series with a ridiculously short battery life (like 90 minutes or less). AFAIK, there are few airlines that offer a/c current for laptops so this may be another reason why the service is failing. I mean, why on earth would I pay for 5 hours of access when I'd only be able to use 1 or 2 at best.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Actually, I've been doing that for over a decade.
I used to oversee nationial rollouts of systems, which meant I was on the road 95% of the time, often spending only a day or two in each site before moving on. I had enough to worry about without babysitting a suitcase which may or may not arrive on my flight, but was on the road long enough and in different enough climates every week that a roll-on wasn't sufficient.
Enter FedEx.
Every few weeks I'd pack up a load of freshly cleaned/laundered clothes and send them to my major destinations over the next month. Coats & thick socks to cold places, extra shirts & undershirts to hot ones, replacement underwear, etc. I'd put each cache in a cheap collapsable nylon duffel, then into the office for shipping to jobsites with strict instructions to hold for my arrival (there were usually a couple of other boxes full of gear)
Sure I had to pop by a store every so often, but at least I wasn't inconveniently buying a couple of new dress shirts at top dollar every week, and these were already laundered, pressed, etc. Plus when you're from out of town finding a store that sells decent dress shirts or whatever, getting to it, etc. is just another hassle one can do without. My concerns were the job, finding my way back to tonight's hotel, getting fed decently, and getting to the airport; not haberdashery.
Even if I'm paying I still often ship clothes ahead. It is a small expense compared to much of the trip, and frankly skipping the joy of dragging the suitcase to the airport, then the thrill of the lugguage carrousel at the other end (wheel... of... mangled... lugguage! Did mine arrive today or is it on it's way to Guam? Let's wait an hour surrounded by annoying people to find out!), makes it worth every penny. Check in to my hotel, have them send the box to my room, ahh, properly packed clothes, nothing crushed, all ready for wearing during my stay.
Seriously, career advice? Show up every day looking neat & fresh when everyone else is rumpled and worn. Especially true with suits, they can only be worn so many days in a row before getting nasty, no matter how often they're sent out for overnight abuse at outragous rates by the hotel dryclean service. Shipping costs are just a sound investment then.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
"If you can't bring your laptop on the flight, what did they expect!!?"
Boeing launched the service in 2004.
Reading through comments here brings one thing to light. It never ceases to amaze how many can declare something like this being so easy to do that it should be cheap or free.
This is like the idiot manager who figures if he can write a word document about a process in a day it should not take that long for me to code it. After all, he had to add bullet points and color too.
Combine "anything" with the word "airplane" and suddenly the complexity level goes up. Its like movies and water. There are so many dependancies that did not exist before that it becomes mind boggling.
How do you make it seamless?
How much redunancy has to be built in so that is works 99% of the time? Fail more than once for any traveler and it probably will never sell to him or his friends again.
How do you prove beyond a doubt it cannot intefere with the flight?
How will other passengers respond to other people on long flights engaging in business all the time? Do you allow vid conferencing? etc?
I didn't see the costs as unreasonable. The fact that the time on the plane wasn't being wasted by just sitting and drumming of fingers more than easily justified that middling cost. Of course to the know-it-alls here most would have you believe that it was a crime to charge so much even though their time is worth far more than some egotistical ceos.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I think the service was pretty cool, espeically on flights from us to europe. It made the time go by quicker. However the problem really wasn't with the access but with the fact that most economy seats do not have power adapters. So your typical laptop would last 3 our of the 8 hours you pay for, unless you were sitting in buissness and could actually plug it in. Still I'm going to miss it.
The airlines needed to spend hundreds of thousands per plane to install connexion, something financially strapped airlines wern't exactly clamoring to do.
paintball
On most Airbus a/c, there's a 15 (17?) VDC outlet in your seat. Just have to get the right Ay-dapter kit.
They're just getting ahead of the curve before fuelcell mobiles become standard traveler equipment. Next up, they prekill us after preboarding to prevent suicide bombers.
--
make install -not war
Realistically, this kind of service is for business/first class only. When you are crammed into an economy seat with the person in front of you reclined, trying to use a laptop is no fun. Better to get some sleep to reduce jet lag at the other end.
need/want to stay connected in the first place? Many of us look forward to the brief respite from the digital leash. Most laptop users I've encountered do 'work' in the first few minutes before takeoff to look productive as everyones gets seated, then productivity goes downhill from there... :-)
I do not think pricing was the issue. Let's face it - most people who are travelling on a commercial airline probably are prepared for some $100 or more in incidental fees as part of their journey, to cover overpriced airport food, cabs, tips, baggage carts, etc. I don't think an extra $30 for entertainment on the airplane would be an issue for most people.
I believe lack of access was the issue. Most people don't have a notebook computer. If they had free wireless portable tablets they could hand out to passengers like pillows, I think they would have gotten a lot more takers for their service.
You could do a lot with those terminals - watch the movie of your choice (rather than whatever santized offering is playing overhead, if anything), listen to music, surf the web, or buy things from their "Skymiles" catalog, whatever.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The problem with cell phones in a plane is two fold:
- distance from tower
- rate of movement of plane
For the first point, because the cell phone is so far from the tower it is actually boosting its signal output to maximum. As for the second point, the plane is moving so fast that they phone is consistently trying to shift to different towers. The solutions for in flight phone usage, I believe, work on the basis of having an in-plane base-station and then the plane communicating with a satellite. This reduces cell phone signal output to something controlable and also ensures a fixed communication point.
While there is the possibility that airlines don't want using cell phones, so they can charge you extra for their phones, there is another possibility: Airliners use IFR (instrument flight rule), and anything that could be disruptive to the instruments needs to be eliminiated. No airline wants to be responsible for an aeroplane going down because of a cell phone, even if there is a 1 in 1000 probability. Unless there is guarantee the risk is less than 0.0001%, then no airline is likely to want to risk profits or reputation.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Yeah, BillyJoeBob was annoying, as is "I'M UP HIGH SO I MUST SHOUT" but as you noted they don't make all that many calls.
However for others of us airphones are vital. I've had to participate in meetings, diagnose problems, once even fire a person, all at 30,000'.
I had to be in transit that day, and the meeting had to happen, and short of cerebral anurism I had to be actively involved in it.
The network was misrouting, I had to fix it, and yes I was the only one with the current knowledge of that site to fix it in a reasonable time-frame.
The employee had to be fired and I was her supervisor, and the one who had discovered the need for getting her out the door ASAP.
All made possible by airphones, and all worth every penny they cost.
Heck, I've been on a flight, had an emergency come up, been booked for another flight while in the air, walked over to that one's gate & taken off, solved that problem en-route, then pulled to another crisis in yet a different destination and arranged for what I'd need, all from onboard aircraft. Boston > LA > Dallas > Atlanta that day, a serious phone bill, and even at US$5/minute easily, trivially, justified.
Of course, I've also called a buddy who lived on my approach path and gotten him to wave as I descended. He lived on the coast, near an obvious landmark, so it was pretty easy. I was able to spot his jeep, him, and confirm it by telling hom on the phone where his jeep was parked and where he was standing in relation to it. I don't recall if I expensed that call or not ;p
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Drinks are already free on international flights on major airlines, but for obvious reasons, they won't serve you excessive amounts.
At least for international travel. It would cost $177 each way to ship just 20 lbs of clothes from here in Colorado to London via FedEx ($255 for 40 lbs of clothes). Were you just doing domestic travel?
I found Connexion useful, reasonably priced and decently performing.
:(
I helped a customer out over Messenger while flying over the ocean.
These days, a lot of an IT persons work involves frequent internet access, to send mails, check things on the web etc. It's worth paying a few dollars more on your thousand dollar flight in order to make that time productive.
I guess they must have budgeted for domestic airlines using it though, and I guess they are not keen to do so
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Glad that I actually tried it on Lufthansa! It worked very well. I checked my mail, MSN'ed (with video), and even made Skype calls to buddies on the ground... and they were shocked ('cos I wasn't supposed to make a call at that time.)
And best of all, it was free 'cos they were giving away 30-min Free Trial cards at the airport. Seriously, I feel a bit sad to see such a good service to go away. Yep, I know the service is overpriced...
So Connexion was 300 times faster than my home broadband?
Mmmm... Boeing scraps... *licks chops*
(I'm fasting for surgery. The entire world looks like food.)
Sure, laptops are allowed again, but what about those new mobile devices that are field testing ethanol based fuel cells? When airport security asks what the pocket full of ampules in your laptop bag are for, I'm thinking they're not going to like the answer.
Then again, some of these new laptop batteries can explode when struck or heated and they're allowed, so maybe, if the cigarette lobby lawyers who got Homeland Security to allow cigarette lighters on planes go to work for a laptop lobby, then fuel cell laptops will get the go-ahead too.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
You see, with such a terror threat we can't be expected to allow those tricky bastards to communicate while in flight, that would be too much. After all, we almost got screwed allowing them to bring on bottled water, so internet is out of the question.
-Tim Louden
Why have in flight internet access if we have to check our exploding laptops as baggage? Can I still buy vodka on this flight? There's a liquid explossive for ya, Vodka, Whiskey.. etc.
--AD
I find all this talk of internet access in economy hilarious. On most flights with the seat pitch what it is I can barely open a paperback book on the tray table. My laptop? Forget it!! It stays in the overhead bin.
I travel regularly on long flights and have actively sought out airlines with an internet connection. To be able to be on-line working has meant that a day on an airplane has been a productive day - I'm sad to see this service disappear.
Sounds like a classic case of poor company organisation to me.
If you're that indispensable, and they can't operate without you being available for 24 hours, then the company is setting itself up for major problems down the track.
Just like building anything robust - you DON'T set yourself up with a single point of failure...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Wanker
Having just made use of this on a trans-Pacific (13h in the air) flight, I can definitely say it's not overpriced. Upstream is only around 4 kbps (making scp's to my home box a bit frustrating), but downstream was fast and stable enough that I didn't have much problem using either ssh or Mozilla. From the viewpoint of someone who does a Japan/US round trip about once a year, it's unfortunate they're dropping the service, though with the infrastructure necessary to support it I suppose I can't blame them.
Sooner or later that time should come. It's too much work everywhere at least you can rest a bit in plane :)
Satcom Direct charges $12/min for each 64K connection. The airlines truly can't find a market for it because the people that can afford those rates buy their own plane and half of them can't afford it. Imagine paying $24/min and not even getting a true 128K connection. It's not the airlines that are charging huge rates for this service. It's the Satellite providers. I'm not aware of any ground based high speed connection. There is one planned by Aircell, but it's not available yet.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
Trust me, the airlines are losing money on this. What is the cost for the flight for the airline when the internet connection is probably up for the whole trip? It's more than I'd be willing to spend.
There is no useable ground based option, yet. If there was, it would probably cost $3+/min.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
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After viewing the glory of goatse, Patrick Norton literally could not see the light at the end of the tunnel, and furiously masturbated, and is still masturbating at this very moment. Apple has tried to downplay the incident by including goatse as the bootup splash screen in future versions of its amazingly inefficient failure of an operating system, in an attempt to make peace with the GNAA before facing total annhiliation.
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