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Why In-Flight Wi-Fi Is Still Slow and Expensive
An anonymous reader writes: Let's grant that having access to the internet while on an airplane is pretty amazing. When airlines first began offering it several years ago, it was agonizingly slow and somewhat pricey as well. Unfortunately, it's only gotten more expensive over the years, and the speeds are still frustrating. This is in part because the main provider of in-flight internet, Gogo, knows most of its regular customers will pay for it, regardless of cost. Business travelers with expense accounts don't care if it's $1 or $10 or $50 — they need to stay connected. Data speeds haven't improved because Gogo says the scale isn't big enough to do much infrastructure investment, and most of the hardware is custom-made. A third of Gogo-equipped planes can manage 10 Mbps, while the rest top out at 3 Mbps. There's hope on the horizon — the company says a new satellite service should enable 70 Mbps per plane by the end of the year — but who knows how much they'll charge for an actual useful connection.
All true with the exception of JetBlue who provides some of the fastest in-flight WiFi for FREE. I've streamed Netflix on JetBlue flights without any problem.
Well no, even when travelling on business all my docs are on a web-server, often with images. Also, VNC is an essential part of my job, in that I cannot run the sims on a puny IT issued laptop, and need my desktop or datacenter to see waves and do any form of debug. But wifi as it exists makes this painful.
Certainly youtube/netflix/etc. would be nice, but at this point the I'd consider mail, web and vnc as "essential".
"When setting up an access point, it should be possible to designate it as "expensive", and by default devices should adhere to this and try to limit unnecessary data usage"
Android has a feature (settings / data usage / menu / mobile hotspots) to do exactly that. Android also seems to detect if it is tethered to another Android phone but I'm not sure how that works. iPhones certainly don't recognize Android hotspots, as a I learned when my friend's iPhone downloaded 50 MB roaming data in 3 minutes when she just wanted to check her email.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
One would think that latency is much less of an issue when you are 9 km closer to the satellite, with nothing obstructing the Fresnel zone.
When the satellite is somewhere between 750km (for LEO) to 40,000km (for Geosynchronous), 9km doesn't make much difference.