How Inflight Wifi Works
thepointsguy.com
thepointsguy.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
1: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/26/for-onboard-wi-fi-not-all-air...
(this was google result number one for 'percent of flights with wifi')
Just having a route as wifi capable does not mean you will get wifi on a given flight.
Gogo (Delta/American/Virgin) - Meh (anywhere between 50-1000 KB/s)
United - Mostly crap (anywhere between 5-200 KB/s)
Jet Blue - Free tier was pretty solid (anywhere between 500-1500 KB/s)
Something about my lawn...
Source: I used to do some consultancy for a provider of in-flight entertainment / wifi systems.
Well, well, well...
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 ...
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]
Other services do one or both of the above. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gogo_Inflight_Internet [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_44 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnAir_(telecommunications)
Would suck for those without smartphones, though. Maybe they could lend out crappy Android tablets to that minority of customers.
No outlets yet, but rumors are that the next generation of interiors might.
[1] https://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/travel/inflight/ent...
Free WiFi on all flights as part of your ticket price!
Mains power supply provided for $30/hour ;)
New TSA policy: Li-ion/Li-poly/etc batteries cannot be more than 20% charged for safety.
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.
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?
Also, if we ever run into each other on our travels, I'll buy you a beer.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.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
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.
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.
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.
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 ;-)
I like your idea about long-form music too. I have lots of classical playlists but I mostly use them as background.
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.
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.
I've heard that it's actually a pretty viable travel strategy in some areas of the world.
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.
80 GBP is almost triple the normal price at the Macy's down the street from me in the US.
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.
haven't found much so far except for extremely expensive (5-figure) expedition type rigs.
Probably should be formerly.
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.
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
This happens to me too on my home 50Mbps connection.