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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.
70 Mbps per plane sounds good on the face of it, but if that's being delivered via satellite then I would expect that latency becomes much more of an issue. Is this just replacing one problem with another?
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.
In french un gogo means an easily fooled person ...
... who still thinks being able to get a wireless internet link in an aircraft doing 600mph at 35K feet is pretty fucking amazing. I can't believe people complain about the bandwidth - they should be grateful this tech exists at all.
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.
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.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Southwest offers a discount "messaging only" access plan on flights. I'm not sure exactly what is included or how they determine what traffic to let through. If they dedicated a portion of bandwidth for the things that business users care about (email), it would be a higher value offering. Right now that traffic gets mixed in with people wanting to do things like Youtube and Skype on the plane. I pointed this out in another post, but I don't know of any employers who reimburse WiFi on the plane. However, it's also not expensive. If you fly once every few months, maybe you think $8-$10 is expensive for this amazing technology. There are monthly plans available, though, that seem pretty reasonable.
Latency is only really an issue with certain applications like on-line gaming or VOIP. For web browsing, file downloading, even video/audio streaming, latency isn't a big deal.
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...is slow and expensive?
I'm sure I'm not the first person in the world to have come up with the idea of putting a Dollar Store in an airport. Since I've never owned or operated a retail outlet of any kind, though, I can imagine there's some sort of prohibition to the idea that I haven't thought of yet. But by and large, the reason we don't see this is it would probably piss in someone's corn flakes that someone, in some airport somewhere, would get something for cheap.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
They'd make the same money per flight if 10 people paid $1 or if 1 person paid $10. They just want to keep it greedy.
Just the opposite, in fact - they want to keep it "fair" and that's the whole problem. Reality is you get what you pay for. This is true for loads of gravel to bandwidth.
But Americans are programmed to demand "fairness" and "equality" in all things and revolt when given pricing tiers that reflect reality. The most workable option, at present, would probably be to have SSID's for "First Class", "Business Class", and "Steerage", because those discrimination levels currently exist, and price accordingly, though there's no rational reason for somebody to not be able to prefer steerage seating and first-class routing, or vice-versa.
"Fairness" is a dangerous fantasy.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Latency is only really an issue with certain applications like on-line gaming or VOIP.
Or remote desktop solutions such as VNC, RDP, or X11.
Hey if you think that you can provide a better, cheaper service, you're free to do so.
Unless Gogo has all your potential clients tied up for a decade with exclusive contracts.
I don't think latency is a real issue for text mode.
I think generally when people say "using Skype," they mean using it for video or voice, as those are the specific functions that set it apart from the countless ways people can send text messages to and from each other. If someone asks you to use your phone, I expect that you'd be put out if they used it to scrape off their boots, even though that could be described as "using the phone."