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AT&T Won't Do In-Flight Wi-Fi After All
jfruh writes In-flight Wi-Fi services tend to be expensive and disappointingly slow. So when AT&T announced a few months ago that it was planning on getting into the business, with customer airlines being able to connect to AT&T's LTE network instead of slow satellite services, the industry shook. But now AT&T has announced that, upon further review, they're not going to bother.
You think they would have at least bilked the government for a few billion in tax dollars for before not bothering to do anything.
LTE was touted as the Next Big Thing by telco providers. Not any more now. Telcos have become fairly conservative, technology-wise. Is that a worldwide trend ?
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Gee, AT&T would have fit right in then. Nobody does crappy, overpriced internet service like them.
Maybe Comcast will do in-flight wifi instead?
But they will find the money to sue the government if it ever tries to provide the service.
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I don't know exactly how this would have worked anyway.
It's been a while since I worked on LTE (call processing, not RF or hardware or even baseband), but I thought that with UTRAN there was a 350 km/h "speed limit" (perhaps up to 500 km/h under certain circumstances) with motion relative to the base station.
(Now that I spent 5 seconds thinking about it, I suppose the sine of the angle (from base station to aircraft, relative to vertical) would reduce the velocity that the plane was moving away from the base station... I think?)
I'm sure there are many other effects such as transmit power, interference, fading & multipath, etc. Sheesh I'm getting rusty...
Yes it's slow, but it's usable as long as it's over $5 (seems to be the right price to limit demand). I consider $8 for a 5 hours not a terrible price at all, about 5% of a cheap tick, or 2% of a last minute one, for immense improvement of flight quality. Though when it used to be $5 on southwest, I always marveled they made it not worth the five dollars, the recent price increase brings it in line with others.
It used to be worth it, until they made the seats so damn close together that laptop use is excruciating unless you're in first class. Heaven forbid the sod in front of you reclines his seat, in which case there literally isn't room for the laptop to fully open unless you suck your chest in. Nah, I would rather get my work done in the relative comfort of the terminal, and use the in flight time for catching up on podcasts or reading.
I meant worth it as entertainment (op here, I haven't figured out how to post a too level comment on the mobile site, and the main site doesn't login after typing). There's definitely not enough space to do work, but for fucking around in places such as this on a tablet or a phone it's great.
By the time you're allowed to take your laptop out, you practically need to put it away anyway.
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By the time you're allowed to take your laptop out, you practically need to put it away anyway.
None of my flights are that quick. I'm driving if the travel distance is that short.
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I found my cross country trips (with change in Denver) had a lot of dead time between take-off to smooth enough air for a laptop and landing.
I am a definite 12 hours or less drive person though, because I can pack sloppy.
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Also, the airplane internet is too lame to work on, even when it's well worth it, if I'm going to do work, it would have to be local, or just emailing.
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