Why is it taking U.S. airlines so long to offer in-flight Wi-Fi?

http://skift.com/2012/11/19/why-is-it-taking-u-s-airlines-so-long-to-offer-in-flight-wi-fi/

by danso • 14 years ago

32 33 14 years ago

baldgeek• 14 years ago

I work at the largest IFE vendor in the world, and I can tell you that current satellite networking implementations would not be able to support a full aircraft. So if they did offer it, they would have to price it very high to keep an appropriate level of service.

I paid 30 Euros for 'net access on a lufthansa flight and only saw only 3 other people in the Economy cabin using it.

StavrosK• 14 years ago

Would you happen to know how they keep the antenna aimed at the satellite? Or is it omnidirectional? I have no clue how it works.

trentmb• 14 years ago

I think phased arrays might be used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array

mikeash2• 14 years ago

That's too bad. I dream of having internet access on long flights to China.

The cellular-based stuff works very nicely while over land, at least. It's not super fast, but decent.

joezydeco2• 14 years ago

So let's get the question clarified: Why don't cash-strapped US carriers take their planes offline to add this expensive, FAA-certified equipment to their aircraft?

And, once the equipment in installed, how do carriers make back that expense? Do they give it away, hoping that customers will choose their airline over others because it has wifi and not just on the cost of the seat as usual? Every plane is already packed. Where do the gains come from?

The external antennas also add drag to the fuselage, which means more fuel to burn and more money lost there. Who pays for that? Who convinces the flight attendants to suddenly become tech support? They're busy rebooting the in-flight entertainment systems three times per trip as it is.

Nursie• 14 years ago

They charge.

That's what the airlines that have this stuff already do. Emirates got $5 from me for a small amount of Wifi, and really I only did it for the novelty I suppose, but it seems to work for them.

eduardordm• 14 years ago

The antennas are already installed in pretty much all 'newer'airplanes due to ACARS, only the internal antennas and software need work.

'The external antennas also add drag to the fuselage' not really. I used to fly airplanes with antennas installed, they were used for ACARS only, no changes to consumption were in any spec or manual. Those numbers are important and even minor changes are always there. If not were so small they couldn't be measured.

The upfront investment and certification process are probably the reason this is taking this long.

Companies will never make any money out of wifi, but companies that choose not to offer it are doomed.

joezydeco2• 14 years ago

According to the wiki page on Boeing's Connexion, the equipment cost was $500,000.

mikeash2• 14 years ago

I preferentially book with carriers that offer wifi, and routinely pay $10+ to use it. It's not as common as I'd like, but it is available all over the place and seems to be making money. I don't understand why you appear to be posting from the assumption that it can't be done, when it is being done.

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

I don't understand why the consumer airline industry is in a perpetual state of bankruptcy. If the planes are "already packed", as you say, why don't they just increase airfares to boost their profits?

corin_• 14 years ago

Because they are, for the most part, in a race to the bottom, and without price-collusion any single airline raising their prices would see them lose customers to their rivals.

adaml_623• 14 years ago

That's a really good question and I suggest you google it. The query 'Why are airlines always bankrupt' makes for some interesting reading.

I think the real question is... why do investors keep investing in something that historically has never made much money.

monksy2• 14 years ago

I believe the link was already posted [boardingarea]. But they have to take a plane in for maintenance to do this. It takes: 1. Time to install it over night 2. Extra training to fit it 3. More mechanics

The last thing you want to do is cancel a morning commuter flight over WIFI.

Did a google search and here is one from American: http://geekbeat.tv/how-american-airlines-installs-wi-fi/

joonix• 14 years ago

Not to mention in-flight wifi cannibalizes existing revenues from individual in-flight entertainment units which carriers were still in the process of installing. Bored people without internet are more likely to pay $6 to watch live TV or movies.

PaulHoule• 14 years ago

Although I tend to check bags to not be a part of the "stuff the overheads bin" battle on most flights, Wi-Fi is the only extra I'll pay for on a plane. I've got no interest in stale food, alcohol, duty free, extra legroom or first class.

However, I don't plan my itinerary on it. In particular, Delta is much more likely to have Wi-Fi on the long hop from the hub to the west coast than Usair, but Usair is much more able to find me return flights that aren't a redeye... It took just one night looking at a Texas sky that was the color of television static to decide I'd rather skip Wi-Fi than fly the redeye home.

simulate• 14 years ago

The U.S. currently has better coverage than Europe. Only a handful of carriers are offering wifi in Europe. KLM, Air France are experimenting. Norwegian offers wifi. Lufthansa offers wifi on transatlantic flights. The reason for this is Gogo, who is providing nearly all the wifi in the U.S. Gogo has made wifi relatively easy for U.S. carriers to adopt. There is nothing yet equivalent to Gogo in Europe.

Separately, Gogo is expanding its in-flight bandwidth. I'm looking forward to that. http://thebat-sf.com/2012/11/13/gogo-to-upgrade-inflight-wi-...

khuey• 14 years ago

Yeah, I'm quite surprised to hear people complain about the lack of inflight wifi in the US. American carriers are pretty far ahead of carriers in other countries on this.

JimmaDaRustla• 14 years ago

Cat6 is cheap nowadays!

bravura• 14 years ago

Question:

What service can I use to find inexpensive flights with flexible travel dates (+-N days) and in-flight wifi?

kayak, my typical goto source for finding tickets, allows me to use flexible dates to minimize my travel costs. I then buy the ticket direct from the airline. It doesn't have wifi information, AFAIK.

routehappy, the site hyped by OP, allows you to sort by happiness and select on features like wifi. However, it doesn't appear to allow flexible travel dates, nor can you sort by price, or even see the price (!?).

What travel aggregator should I use?

dumitrue• 14 years ago

Kayak allows you to filter by wifi availability, I've used it many times: after searching go to "more filters" and select "show wi-fi flights only". Note that not even the airline can guarantee that there will be wifi on your flight, as equipment changes can and do happen.

pulplobster• 14 years ago

hipmunk.com is the best out there. It shows whether a flight has wifi or not, it has a price graph for flexible flights, and their interface is just the best I've found.

Goopplesoft• 14 years ago

Try hipmunk.com, flexible +-2 day search or monthly search with wifi icons next to flights offering it.

jjcm• 14 years ago

Google's flight search has a "lowest fare for a n day trip" page that's pretty useful for flexible travel dates. You can't sort by wifi only though.

https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=SFO;t=PDX;d=2012-12...

telecuda• 14 years ago

This is Apple's opportunity to get involved. I love that I can iMessage from my laptop while on Southwest WiFi. They need to extend it to the phone.

Idea #1: Picture there being two WiFi networks on a plane: Internet Access and iMessage. Connect to iMessage from your iPhone/iPad, let Apple charge your iTunes account if necessary, then conveniently text from your phone. Great for the low-bandwidth situation they're limited by. [yes, you could pay using GoGo etc from your mobile phone and do this, but few know about it and the UX stinks]

Idea #2: Flight trackers as a landing page are nice, but get companies to pay a buck or two to put their product or commercial on your connection page to further subsidize the cost. Picture even a Google/Facebook ad model where you could target your ad to the person's demographic based on their gender and DOB from their frequent flier number.

Idea #3: For the love of God please do a better job throttling and/or blocking bandwidth hogs until the tech is better. Some guy sitting next to me trying to synch 20GB on Dropbox just doesn't seem good for the rest of the plane while my Southwest connection is too slow to load Gmail.

sareon• 14 years ago

When airlines don't allow you to use a kindle during take-off, but you can use a read an actual book... it doesn't give much in terms of encouragement that they are going to start offering free wifi.

drusenko• 14 years ago

This article is extremely misleading. Delta has 100% coverage for their own fleet.

They do have a significant number of short-haul flights offered by affiliates under the "Delta Connection" brand -- these are all very small planes where you might have 30 minutes to use your laptop between reaching altitude and starting descent. Even so, Delta is equipping these planes with wifi, too.

Someone isn't doing a good job of reading or understanding their data on Delta, and that makes me question the rest of the conclusions...

monksy2• 14 years ago

I can understand this being a priority on routes that take longer than 10 hours. But, whats wrong with working offline, or reading during that time? Its not like you're going to be able to pull down large amounts of data, or view realtime video.

apaprocki• 14 years ago

That isn't true. I was on a Delta flight to JSConf in Portland in 2011 when Osama bin Laden was killed and was watching it live as it was unfolding. Just this week I was flying to/from LAX and was Citrix'd into work to deal with some issues. I was getting roughly 300kbit up/down on the last trip. The whole plane has about 3Mbps bandwidth.

jedberg• 14 years ago

When the reddit team was 4 people, we would preference towards flights with wifi when we all had to go somewhere, because we wanted to be able to fix the site if it broke.

Also, when programming, I find I'm much more productive when I have the internet available for looking up docs, getting libraries, etc.

ShabbyDoo• 14 years ago

Because I fly Southwest so much, I get free WiFi when available. Of my ten or attempts at using it, I've had no connectivity at least three times. Of those, perhaps five attempts resulted in connectivity so slow that it was only useful for background email checking and painfully slow web browsing. The remaining two "successful" uses had a 128K-ish downstream at best. Ping times (to whatever www.google.com resolved to) were 500+ ms at best and multi-second at worst. Periods of flakiness lasting a few minutes at a time were common. So, unless I have some urgent usage requirement, I just stay offline to avoid the hassle and anger.

Why is it taking U.S. airlines so long to offer in-flight Wi-Fi?

Related Stories