Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
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...
Sounds like a classic FUD move, by a huge player with vested interests in the Dumb Pipe market.
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.
Maybe Comcast will do in-flight wifi instead?
The cable costs alone would be prohibitive.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.