"Prior to the integration of in-flight Wi-Fi, most airline passengers passed their time at 30,000 feet completely disconnected from the world below them — but these days, that’s a highly uncommon occurrence."
Am I missing something here? 99% of the flights I take don't offer Wi-Fi, and in most cases not even power outlets. And those that do have Wi-Fi seem to be charging 30% of my monthly internet bill to provide it for a mere few hours. Like, no thanks.
60% of domestic flights have wifi on them. My apologies if you are flying outside the US or using regional carriers 98% of the time (which might not be included here).
I'm going to counter with my anecdote - of the 6 domestic planes I've been on in the past few months... Only 1 had a working wifi for the entire flight. 2 had no wifi available and the other 3 had connectivity or service issues for at least half of the flight.
Just having a route as wifi capable does not mean you will get wifi on a given flight.
I think you're an unusual case. There are a ton of flights with WiFi these days.
I don't get the complaints about cost, either. They're connecting you to the world from six miles in the air. It's a pretty impressive technical feat, and $10 is a pretty reasonable cost for that. When you really need it, it's very cheap, considering. When you don't really need it, well, your cat GIFs can wait until you land.
Meh? I'd say the airplane itself is the biggest technical feat. Wi-Fi is like water in the 21st century; it should be free. And without the silly login screens that wreak havoc with various apps on my phone.
Speaking of which, I wonder if TCP-over-DNS might work with in-flight Wi-Fi. It worked well enough to get a crappy kilobit link at a lot of hotels back in the day before I had 4G tethering and stopped caring.
I didn't say anything about biggest. I'll note that they typically charge an order of magnitude or two more for the airplane than for the WiFi, so I don't see anything contradictory there.
Why should WiFi be free like water regardless of where you are? WiFi in a coffee shop, sure. It costs about $100 to set it up and maybe $50/month to run it for the whole place. WiFi on an airplane? That's neither easy nor cheap to provide.
For the same reason drinking water is free on airplanes. For the same reason it's free to use bathrooms on planes. These are considered basic human necessities. I see internet access becoming a basic human necessity. Sooner or later our devices will "expect" to be connected 24 hours a day, and the applications running on them will make the assumption that internet access is available at all times with smooth handovers between Wi-Fi networks, 4G, and other technologies, and zero interruptions or downtime during handovers.
Handicapped people will rely on it to see, to hear. Everyone else will use it to slash and cut language barriers, doing real-time, face-to-face, cloud-based speech translation with augmented reality so you can talk to anyone, anytime, without any barriers. Indoor maps and navigation will become a reality, superimposed over our vision, telling us when and where to go so we aren't late, informing us of dangers, and educating us about the world around us. Self-driving robots, cars, and other gadgets will rely on constant, reliable bandwidth, and link to our calendar management services and travel planners so they can just show up without us actually even having to open an app to call them. Health monitoring devices will tell us based on cloud-based services if we encounter foods that contain allergens, and constantly update their data and firmware.
A paywall that causes even 60 seconds of interruption to this flow of data is going to throw off this technological dream. Internet access should be available worldwide for the same reason nobody charges you to breathe their oxygen. I should be able to board a plane and my data streams should handed over smoothly from airport Wi-Fi, in-flight Wi-Fi, and 3G/4G where necessary, without even so much as to drop a TCP socket.
Having uninterrupted access to the internet should be a problem that the world's infrastructure engineers collectively take care of, so that software and consumer device engineers can collectively abstract this problem away.
I'd even rather pay for water, whose supply can be interrupted for minutes or even hours. But please give me constant, 24/7 internet access, no matter where I'm in the world, with almost zero downtime, so that we can go ahead and invent what the 21st century was meant to be.
Curiosly, water is free on airlines because, blood clots and strokes. When water isn't provided, old folks can get blood clots in their legs from being cooped up for hours. Once they got off the plane the clot would move, and very soon it would enter the brain and boom! they'd fall over, usually in the terminal.
With water, they don't fall over in the terminal. Maybe out in the parking lot or in their car. But not where the airlines are liable, so all is well.
Well, when this utopia you imagine comes to fruition, then you can complain about how airplane WiFi ought to be free. I bet it'll be a lot cheaper to provide by then. But for now, let's focus on how things currently are, and how they are is pretty much nobody needs internet access while on a plane, and those who do should be able to afford the $10.
It should be reasonably cheap to provide, even now. Hike all airfares by $0.25, and provide it free. Throttle the bandwidth for people who abuse what the connection is capable of. From a software innovation standpoint this would be a much better situation. In-flight social networks, in-flight CDNs and mesh networks that efficiently deliver mass amounts of video content over limited bandwidth, virtual reality experiences between passengers to kill the time, augmented reality telling you what's interesting on the ground where you're flying, the possibilities are endless, if only we could assume everyone was connected.
I must say, none of what you describe sounds even remotely interesting. It's like one of those articles from the early 90s prognosticating on all the cool stuff the internet would enable, and getting it all terribly wrong. Virtual reality experiences between passengers? Pass.
In-flight internet gets used for exactly the same stuff as internet anywhere else. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but that's what you're going to enable, not these weird new things.
While its been a long time since I've been on an airplane _without_ Wi-Fi, I don't often see power outlets. And as you alluded to, most of the time its $10 for the duration of that flight, whether its 5 hours or 30 minutes.
What airline are YOU flying? I am usually on a 737 built before cell phones were invented. I consider myself lucky if the SkyMall hasn't been stolen, let alone in-flight Wi-Fi.
You're one of the lucky ones. Almost all my flights have power outlets, which means that some stranger is going to be rooting around my ankles trying to find the damn outlet for the first 20 minutes of the voyage.
In my experience the outlets are always on the back of the seat in front of mine, that floor socket seems like a bad design in a space-cramped setting.
Jet Blue just rolled out free wifi to most of their US-based flights... and while it was pretty slow, I could still RDP into my work computer to answer emails and read HN. That was pretty sweet. You can pay $10 to get "gaming" speeds but I didn't test it out. I'd imagine most pings being >200ms. Has anyone tried it out?
I work for ViaSat (the satellite provider for FlyFi)! You'll never have latency fast enough for "gaming" speeds, as your signal has to travel halfway to the moon and back meaning a physical limit of at least 500ms.
Not good enough for gaming, but streaming/torrents/large downloads work great.
So, does viasat use different beams for the airplane links than the normal ground based, satellite consumers ?
I assume yes, since most of the beams for ground users are stupendously oversubscribed, such that you can't even open gmail or load your banks website during a lot of the business day.
Our solution for rural Internet used to be a plain old T1 from AT&T @ $450/month, and we replaced it with 12mbps viasat at $149/mo ... and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't wish we had that T1 back ...
Most US domestic airlines don't use satellite links, since they're always above ground. They tend to use ground based microwave technology instead, which offers better latency.
Source: I used to do some consultancy for a provider of in-flight entertainment / wifi systems.
Does anyone have details on the ground based cell networks used for some planes? Are they partnering with a provider like Verizon Wireless to use their existing service, which I don't believe is the case unless they are aiming their antennas into the air on certain towers for them. Or do they just lease space for their own antennas on towers and aim them upwards? and then pay for bandwidth, etc?
GoGo is the big ground-based provider. GoGo uses a network of cell towers that point up rather than down. An antenna under the plane connects to towers much like civilian cellphones. [1]
By contrast, Row 44 (used by Southwest and some international carriers) is a satellite-based system. An antenna on top of the plane connects to a geostationary satellite. [2]
Last I heard, GoGo (previously Aircell) used an MPLS network to shuttle traffic between a few hundred AT&T cell sites they were using for their equipment, but that was years ago.
Of all the things I want on a plane, WiFi ranks a lot lower than having a consistent power outlet at my seat. There's nothing worse than having Wifi but a laptop that can only last a % of the flight.
Hehe, could be, or the recent reduction of carry-on luggage sizes for some airlines, sponsored by Samsonite and other luggage manufacturers, who knows...
I'd love to see an airline get rid of seat back TVs entirely and just provide power outlets instead. There are already systems that let you stream movies for free over in-flight wi-fi - given that most of us have a smartphone (if not a bigger screened device) the experience would probably be better.
Would suck for those without smartphones, though. Maybe they could lend out crappy Android tablets to that minority of customers.
I was recently on an Alaskan Air flight which did just that. It had no TV's on the plane, but power outlets right on the back of the seat. For all of their in flight entertainment, they directed you to their app or site once you connected to the in flight Wi-Fi (for free). I ended up not using it and reading instead (the free content wasn't great) but I really liked the idea and it seemed to work great just poking around, as I did.
Southwest does that in large part: there are zero in-seat entertainment systems, but 80% of planes have WiFi that includes (free) streaming live TV, (pay) streaming movies, and (pay) Internet access.
No outlets yet, but rumors are that the next generation of interiors might.
Some airlines call it "PDE" - Personal Device Entertainment [1]. You connect to internal wifi and can stream all the catalog of movies available aboard. I think it's a lot more convenient than those old (and usually malfunctioning) lcd screens. Even better when there's a USB port right there, so you can charge your phone while you watch it.
Emirates' largest planes have universal AC outlets on most seatbacks, as well as USB. They also have WiFi: no charge for 10 MB and $1 for 600 MB. All of that in economy class.
I found out the hard way that on the new Qantas A380s, the power outlets are only in "premium" economy.
It's $939 from SYD to LAX in December (holy crap, at that price I better take a trip!) in Economy, but a whopping $2539 or $3389 for Premium Economy. I like having an AC outlet too, but that's crazy.
If you do get to use the outlets on the A380, be aware that they do ~75W maximum. Exceed that and they'll shut down, and they don't get reset.
Veering off-topic, if you fly Air New Zealand on that route, you can often use their name-your-own-price auction system to get an upgrade to premium economy for a few hundred dollars.
I'm picturing you on that A380 cursing as you try to blow-dry your hair. What were you doing that pulled more than 75W?
Yep, my 15" rMPB uses an 85w charger which maxed out the in-flight outlet on my last flight, glad I charged the battery before I left, MacBooks last forever!
While on a flight recently, I realized... Why doesn't Google sponsor free in-flight WiFi? It would be much easier than Google Fiber or Project Loon, and it would let them deliver more ads to a fairly wealthy group of people.
Because the (American) airlines will say no. Or, they will accept the offer and then charge $12 per seat anyway. I think they get perverse joy out of nickel and diming people to death. When not-uncomfortable seats are a premium feature, there's nothing they won't charge for.
American travelers tend to purchase tickets based solely on price. If your consumers are very price conscious, you move as much as you can out of the base price.
Don't blame airlines in the US, blame airline customers.
Personally, I like the nickel-and-dime scheme, as you call it. I rarely take cross country flights. My typical travel is 3-4 hours of flying at the most. I absolutely prefer a cheaper base ticket price, because I don't care if they give me crappy food for "free" in that time frame. At 6'2", I fit comfortably even in Spirit's closely-spaced seating. I travel very light and typically have a single bag.
For me, a lower base fare with extra charges for the rest is something I prefer. I am very happy that the US air-traveling market agrees with me and has pushed the industry in this direction.
Alaska Airlines has more often than not convinced me to upgrade to first class. The one way ticket will be ~$100-150 steerage and ~$200 for first class, which gets me that human sized seat and personal space, usb and standard power. That upgrade is worth it to me. $50-100 to reduce my anxiety for a few hours? sold.
I'd be all over that. I recently flew a short Virgin America flight where I only had to pay $190 instead of $140 to get a first class seat. Frankly, I'd pay double for every flight I'm on to get even half that much comfort. The seats were massive, the legroom insane (could not touch the seat in front of me with my feet if I tried), full recliner, etc.
You'd think there would be a logical in-between, but in a world where 20% more space in business class costs you 5x as much, there's no room for the average customer to have a pleasant flight.
Sure they have. All three of the big legacy US airlines have some form of extra-legroom economy: American has Main Cabin Extra, Delta has Comfort+ and United has Economy Plus.
The problem is those seats cost more, and people shop for airfares based solely on the price they see in a search engine.
Airlines have tried all sorts of tricks to get people to buy the nicer seat. They've tried showing it to you as an option at booking. They've tried offering it as an upsell afterward. They've tried offering it during check-in. They've tried branding it as a separate fare class labeled "premium" but still a reasonable-looking price.
It's entirely due to passenger behavior at this point: people will grumble and complain and whine about the legroom and the lack of power and the extra fees for everything, but the next time they book a ticket they'll still just sort by lowest fare and pick that.
It'd be one thing if the basic seats were basic but actually felt like you could sit in them four hours at a stretch without seriously jeopardizing your health. As it is, if the airlines could get away with packing people into 80cm by 80cm by 80cm crates they damn well would, and they'd charge $80 to upgrade to a full meter.
I specifically mentioned that I was looking for a human-sized seat, not more legroom. I'm not unusually tall, I'm an average-sized male adult, and I'd like to have somewhere to put my arm. I don't really enjoy having my elbows pinned to my sides for 4 or 6 or 14 hours.
Wider seats take up more space, which means fewer seats which means less revenue. And there's no way they'll give that up; they're facing competition both domestically and internationally now from sardine-can aircraft layouts on low-cost carriers.
So these days, US-based airlines have standardized on a width of 17-18 inches in economy class. Used to be long-haul international flights would have slightly wider seats, but now they're aiming to get 10-across seating in economy and you can't do that with 18-inch-wide seats.
If you want a wider seat, your options are to pay for first class or (if traveling internationally) pay for premium economy on a foreign carrier.
American Airlines way back had "more room" seats which were only slightly more expensive. I loved it and became loyal. But then they stopped. I guess not a lot of people wanted to pay the few bucks.
They still have those seats; they're branded as "Main Cabin Extra". They're not super expensive, but the price will vary depending on the perceived desirability of the specific seat you select (i.e., an extra-legroom middle seat probably doesn't cost as much as an extra-legroom aisle).
Most airlines also build free or discounted access to those seats into their frequent-flyer perks, though Delta has recently begun cutting back hard on that and treating it as a possible-but-not-guaranteed after-booking "upgrade" even for their top-tier customers.
Sure, but it's at least good PR. Like some other companies, they do a lot of "nice" things that may not gain them anything immediately but it's good for branding and it's still a "by Google" tag on something people want. It reminds me more of companies that underwrite NPR programs or whatever. They aren't getting paid directly but lots of potential customers hear their name and that they sponsored something you want.
This paragraph is absurd. Not sure if the author was excessively exaggerating or this is true. Can someone who's a domain expert or is familiar with the device to clarify why in-flight WAPs are 10x more expensive but 10x more fragile? Cosmic rays?
Called Wireless Access Points (or WAPs), these black boxes
function similarly to Wi-Fi routers that would be found in a
home, but because they’re on an airplane, they cost 10 times more
and break 10 times more easily. Each WAP is connected by a
QuadRax cable, which is essentially formed of wires within wires
within wires.
Certifications usually account for pricing. My father's small plane has a rather simple radio that costs $5k because it's the only one certified to go into his specific plane. You could get a functionally identical radio for under $50, but using it in his plane would be illegal.
The fragility bit doesn't seem too unreasonable. Being encased in the hull of a plain means drastic temperature variations, air pressure variations and TONS of vibration.
Sounds like it's more of a joke, but I bet it feels like they break down more often - it's probably not trivial to just powercycle it mid-flight like you would your router at home.
I have used in-flight WiFi on about 10 to 15 flights, and I would say that about half those times it either breaks midway through the flight or it doesn't work at all. From my anecdotal experience the failure rate is more like 100x higher than home WiFi.
Not that I'm complaining, it's magical to even get WiFi for a few seconds in an airplane. I try to hold the same attitude as Louis CK on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFsOUbZ0Lr0
It's not really the WiFi component that is unreliable though. It's the connection to the ground. Every time the Internet connection breaks down, the WiFi connection itself is fine.
Funny story: some in-flight WiFi services give you a different price based on your user-agent (high for phones, higher for tablets, highest for desktop browers). Fortunately no one can change that...
If you fly a lot and are consistent in your choice of airline, typically you can buy an unlimited-use pass that renews monthly for a flat fee.
If you don't fly often, I know you can prepay for a pass for your flight before leaving home on most services. Though for my use case (flying 75,000-85,000 miles/year on average) the monthly pass is absolutely cheaper.
They also charge less if you buy on the ground. Wouldn't be surprised if they charged more if you registered from airport WiFi. On an android phone, you can connect to WiFi then USB tether.
What's with the insistence on demand for streaming music or video on a plane? Do these people also forgo packing a suitcase and just rebuy everything as needed?
There are already systems that provide that - stream over the inflight Wifi from a movie box somewhere on the plane. Provided I have a power outlet I prefer it to the usual system because my laptop screen is so much better than the in-seat TV.
Are you saying that they should pre-download movies and music to listen to on the plane?
I use Google Play for music because it's pretty okay at letting me cache local music on my phone, but I have no idea how well Rdio, Spotify, or Pandora do that. I don't think there's a way to do it on your computer at all, so if you only have a work phone that you don't keep music on, streaming music might be your only option if you don't want to listen to one of the 13 channels provided via the crappy in-seat audio jack.
>Are you saying that they should pre-download movies and music to listen to on the plane?
Um, yes? It doesn't really seem like a huge deal. On the other hand, I have a fairly large music library on my phone and carry a tablet for movies and other things.
It's not a huge deal. But when I'm packing at the last minute, the last thing I have time to do is sort through my music library to load more stuff onto my phone.
Frankly, I kind of stopped maintaining my MP3 collection the better part of a decade ago. I have lots of stored music, sure, but it's non-trivial to maintain a music library on top of everything else in life. I use Spotify because it's convenient. But yes, they have offline mode if I remember to pre-download everything.
Netflix and Hulu don't support offline caching as far as I'm aware. And I can't run cat5 from my house to a flight. And buying a season of something to download from, e.g., Amazon seems silly when Netflix and Hulu offer it as part of their regular service - now that's like forgoing to pack a suitcase and just buying things on the go again.
Amazon does support offline caching--at least on their own tablets. And there's almost always a season of something I want to watch that isn't available streaming. I've also been known to rip DVDs and import them. The bottom line is that I can find plenty of things to watch that don't require double-buying.
The Spotify android app supports offline playback. I've not used the desktop client in long time buy it probably still does too.
I've never been on a plane that offered wifi but I've never flown internally in the US. I quite enjoy being properly disconnected for the duration of my annual London to San Francisco flight but maybe if I did it more regularly I wouldn't.
Read, watch videos that I've downloaded (unless there are on-demand movies), listen to music/podcasts, play games on my tablet, snooze.
Maybe it's just a function of traveling a lot but I've pretty much got a system down for my in-flight entertainment. I don't really care that much about in-flight Wi-Fi. Sometimes I really need to work on something but generally I find it's hard to use a laptop on a plane unless I'm flying business.
A 10-12 hour flight (or two) is a great chance to do something that wouldn't fit easily into a normal day. You could read Moby-Dick while listening to the Messiah, or something. Bach Cantantas are good, if you like that sort of thing, because there's a couple of hundred of them.
I tend to pack a readable novel (Gaiman, Stephenson, Pratchett or whatever), and it's amazing how fast the time goes. Start reading when you leave for the airport, read it while in queues etc. I read the Harry Potter series that way.
Those of us who still have laptops with proper email clients can also use long flights to dispose of not-so-urgent emails, the only problem being that a lot of people will reply ;-)
(Sadly) longish flights are one of the few times I spend a lot of time reading books these days. Though this ends up meaning that I have lots of dead-tree books laying around home unread because I tend to just take a Kindle traveling.
I like your idea about long-form music too. I have lots of classical playlists but I mostly use them as background.
Wait for sales. The Levi jeans I wear are ~£80 a pair, but often come around at £40. Incidentally I believe Levi jeans in the US are made in Mexico, whereas the ones on the market in the UK are all made in Bangladesh. Some denimheads are convinced the Mexican ones are of poorer workmanship. Different washes (colours) are also priced differently and the cotton may vary between them even if they have the same cut (number). Like anything these days you need to do your research. I've never paid higher than £60 for a pair of jeans and only ever own 2 to 4 pairs at a time. They last a long while.
On a related note. I just got back from a month in the States and was surprised at how comparable prices were to the UK these days. Eating out, clothing, groceries, electronics. All fairly expensive. I'm not sure where rhino369 is shopping.
As I've never bought them in the UK, I don't watch UK prices. I've bought most of mine from JC Penney in the Boulevard mall in Las Vegas, and they often have deals, or will do deals (20% off). I remember getting five black 501 shirts for under $150, though that was a few years ago now ;-)
I usually stock up because (a) you can't rely on companies to keep the style identical -- not even Levi's; and (b) the price is only going to go up. They do last, so I still have several shirts I've never worn.
does anyone know a highly reliable mobile satellite internet solution? price is less-ish of an object but i've been looking for something to take with me on extended camping trips and remote locations to do work or for emergencies (also thinking of buying property somewhere without good wired internet).
haven't found much so far except for extremely expensive (5-figure) expedition type rigs.
It's possible (at least with the HN7000 ku-band system) to put a Hughesnet dish on a tripod and point it yourself (with the proper tools and knowledge). You'd need to get it from a dealer that allows self-installs (Hughesnet won't sell you equipment without a professional installation), such as Montana Satellite.
I have searched for this before too as I'm not comfortable vacationing in places where I'm completely disconnected for a week at a time. Though the only thing I've been able to find are BGAN terminals. The equipment rental + data is extremely expensive.
Should improve over the next few years. There are several large new Ka-band systems either currently coming online (e.g. Inmarsat GX) or under development, and market pressure to build smaller, cheaper satellite terminals.
It used to feel like a sanctuary going on a plane and being forced offline, no social media, no emails, no ads, no constant poking of my dopamine receptors. One of the last refuges.
I thoroughly enjoy driving due to the fact that I know I can't do anything productive on my phone or computer. It's one of the few times I can relax myself and enjoy the experience...something that is dwindling on airplanes as the WIFI technology gets better and better.
I mainly do trans-pacific flights. In such long (>12h) flights I can't use wifi even if its on offer, as it chews through precious battery time too fast. I would kill for plane seats with power plugs, or even just USB power.
Last time I flew internationally, I brought a 2015 macbook pro retina with a hard drive full of videos. I only ended up getting 4 of the advertised 9 hours run time running VLC with the brightness turned all the way down. Luckily, there were power outlets hidden under the seats. I don't understand why power outlets aren't the number 1 selling point for airlines that have them.
In the days when I traveled a lot, I used IBM ThinkPad X laptops with expanded (9-cell) interchangeable batteries. You just take a spare charged battery and swap them over.
I once did London -> Chicago -> Seattle and still had about an hour of battery life for the bus from seatac. That wasn't continuous use, but as much use as I needed.
I brought a 2015 macbook pro retina with a hard drive full of videos
Not clear which exact model you have. Some have a discrete AMD GPU which would take more power.
Also it's not clear what format your videos were in. If it's something like DVD rips, then it could have been MPEG-2. I don't think Intel GPUs have any hardware support for playing that back. Also VLC probably doesn't take advantage of any CPU support for playing back video.
You should do a little more research. Your reported performance seems disappointing. You should be able to do much better. For example the current model 13" claims:
Up to 12 hours iTunes movie playback
Notice they don't mention VLC there. :) So you might have to transcode your video into a format that iTunes supports.
It's the low-end 15" model with Intel Iris 6100 integrated graphics, and the files were mostly H.264. I suppose I could have played them in iTunes, but I made a conscious decision to never run it.
Ah, that's a pity. I might try it when I fly next. Wish there was a website that displayed the airline along with which different tunnelling methods worked. I'd pay for that :)
Am I missing something here? 99% of the flights I take don't offer Wi-Fi, and in most cases not even power outlets. And those that do have Wi-Fi seem to be charging 30% of my monthly internet bill to provide it for a mere few hours. Like, no thanks.