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.

Comments

Re:Problem with the solution?

[edtice1559]

I don't think that would be a problem at all for business users. In fact there is actually plenty of bandwidth on the plane for us. All we want is to be able to send and receive *text* email reliably. The issue with WiFi on planes is that people want to do things like stream Youtube and this eats up all of the bandwidth. Really what is needed is a traffic prioritization solution. I think, however, that the summary is wrong in terms of caring about cost. I don't think that too many employers actually pay for the WiFi on planes. I don't think I've ever purchased it. I mostly use it on Southwest where it is free. (For A-List Preferred flyers)

Virgin Atlantic's 787s

[DougM]

I regularly fly with Virgin Atlantic, and their new 787s have a fantastic wifi service courtesy of T-Mobile. I worked a problem during a recent flight from London to DC spending the entire flight remotely logged-in to remote applications over Citrix XenApp. Latency was poor (you cannae change the laws of physics) but consistent and throughput was perfectly fine.

The cost? £15 for unlimited data for whole the flight. Even better, on my second trip I discovered the service is included in my monthly iPass Mobile Connect subscription, so my incremental cost was zero!

I understand they're using ka-band satellites with approximately 70Mbps per channel. I guess they can always run multiple links if usage takes-off.

Declare SSID's expensive

[amorsen]

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. I get annoyed when I use my phone as a hot spot and discover that my computer has fetched upgrades, my other phone has downloaded a bunch of podcasts, and so on. It would also allow me to keep a backup wireless SSID running permanently, knowing that the devices will go for the cheap SSID first.

I bet that quite a bit of bandwidth usage on planes is due to phones thinking they are switching from expensive (but actually dirt cheap) 3G/4G to cheap (but actually really expensive) wifi.

Re:Problem with the solution?

[TheRaven64]

United has started to roll out something like this (they keep telling me about it, while apologising for the fact that it isn't yet in the planes that I happen to be in at the time), where you can stream the video content to your laptop / tablet / phone, rather than watch on the crappy screen on the back of the seat. It's not terrible well thought through, because they don't provide a little slot on the back of the seat to hold the tablet for you, so you have to balance it on the tray table, which they then put food on. I don't know how much they pay for the in-flight entertainment now, but I bet Netflix could undercut them (especially if they provided a limited catalogue to everyone and a less limited catalogue to their customers. One interesting option would be for Netflix customers to indicate their flight number and select things to be cached before boarding, while the plane is at the gate).