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Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

Edit: a fatal assumption that it's the airlines providing the service underpins my original post below, whereas instead it's the providers charging passengers directly. That's an entirely different model from below, so disregard my original comment aside maybe my last line. Preserving the comment for context though.

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At 25,000/mo, assuming a jet makes 60 trans-con segments in the US per month and a price of $20 per passenger for access on a given segment, you'd need an average of at least 20 people to pay for a full flight's worth of internet access on each segment just to clear the monthly cost, not even counting the up front investment.

And that's for a standard narrow-body passenger jet, not the G650 etc. business jets that they're targeting.

This seems like a flex, not a tool.

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I assume airlines looking to outfit whole fleets aren't finding out about pricing through the website, and probably aren't paying sticker price for either the equipment or the service. I guess the Gulfstream set probably isn't price sensitive, so may as well charge a boatload for these kinds of one-off installs for rich people?

I think the $25,000/mo is just an opening gambit. For comparison, the list price for Starline Marine is $5,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $10,000, and even that seems padded to extract maximum value from yacht owners, cargo ships, etc.

Also, while I imagine the logistics of bouncing 350 MBps from satellite to satellite at 1000 km/h will impose significant overhead, a lot of the places where people will want this service the most (trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific, Kansas cornfields etc) will have very few if any other users.

I think the economics would probably work out for longer international flights. I fly economy with my family and I'd probably be willing to dump out $20/passenger for flights from Seattle to Japan/Europe, considering you're stuck in a seat for like 10 hours. That seems like it'd make long flights quite a bit nicer at a reasonable cost.

Alternatively being able to work more means I don't have to burn as many vacation days just on the transiting parts of travel.

I started boycotting Korean Air. Supposedly the reason why they don’t have wifi is that Koreans are used to great internet service, so it’s better not to have any wifi on their planes than to have slow internet.

I didn’t realize how addicted to the internet I was until I did a 15 hour flight from Boston to Incheon in the spring. Never again. I’ll gladly fly Delta instead.

I wouldn't say I'm addicted, I can manage okay on flights as it is with TV shows/movies/video games/books that I download ahead of time onto various devices. Especially the Switch is very nice, and of course the Steam Deck is probably great for this.

But yeah having internet would be even better.

> flex, not a tool

Suppose that a plane has 250 seats and makes 50 trans-con flights a month.

Airline A decides to advertise having fast internet access in their flight, and raises ticket prices by $2 a seat to fund it.

(250)(50)(2) = 25000

Airline B stays with slow barely usable internet.

Which ticket do you book?

Alas, the market has repeatedly shown that people will choose the cheapest ticket above all other considerations. Unless somebody else is paying the bill, and those business travelers are also the ones most likely to fork out $20/flight for Internet connectivity.

This is anecdotal of course, but I have no qualms about paying a premium out of my own pocket to fly a preferred airline. Anything up 15% and I wouldn't even think twice - and I'd be willing to pay far more than that to avoid certain carriers.

Fast internet is something I would be willing to pay for on certain flights - either as part of the ticket price or as an add-on. Although most of the time I'm content to zone out to a movie or sleep.

Yes, the largest volume chooses the cheapest ticket. However, enough people choose premium options that premium airlines exist.

See also: somebody else paying the bill. I've flown plenty of business class, but never paid anything close to full fare for it: it's either the company footing the bill, miles/points, or (rarely) some crazy routing/fare that gets me within 2x of regular economy.

People choose add ons for their flights all the time. Plenty of people are willing to pay $5-$20 just for the pleasure of choosing their seat.

You're assuming its a fixed increase in price here.

When planes come to be refitted:

- You take out the IFE server rack - weight saving. - Replace the seatback tv's with essentially an all in one smart tv system with apps for major streaming services - Take out the underseat IFE box as its no longer needed - The airline no longer has to pay for tv/movie/music licensing

Let’s not forget that this could be a value add, they can easily increase flight ticket prices by $20 and offer the service for free. They can also remove inflight monitors from the planes, reducing the weight of the overall plane, increase plane tickets by $10 and offer it Free. There’s many ways to play with the numbers

Not sure they'd need to go as far as removing the IFE completely, but a vastly more simple and cheap system could be used instead.

Airlines still rely on those massive clunky boxes under each seat, plus a server rack which adds a fair bit of weight.

Swapping to an all-in-one system - essentially a smart tv built into each monitor that just provides a browser and basic apps for major streaming services would reduce the overall weight of the plane, fix the annoyance of that big box where your legs are supposed to go, and provide entertainment on board.

There's also the costs that airlines normally have for licensing content - those would go away completely if everyone can just log into their own netflix or prime account.

My comment was just a quick idea and what you wrote is well put!

They could add around $3 per ticket and pay for it.

But removing seat-back would be bold - 100 people using a shared 350 connection would probably not work well. 200-odd using it would kill it. Leaving your passengers with a very unhappy experience.

Plenty of flights in the US are BYOD already. You connect to the WiFi and have access to a website (on a laptop) or it's in their app on mobile. And it has video on demand served locally from the plane. It's airline edits with watermarks but a good enough selection I wouldn't expect most people to pay for Internet for streaming.

And on top of that all the major streaming services allow for download for offline viewing. I'm just going to download a bunch of stuff ahead of time to make sure I can watch what I want.

This just serves the folks who want to pay to access the rest of the Internet. And I don't see incentive for anyone to pay and try to use a streaming service. More useful for someone traveling on business needing to join a call or something.

> can also remove inflight monitors

350 Mbps for the entire flight. You're looking at speeds in the 5 Mbps territory optimistically per person. No way can you remove a NAS serving video content with that.

Assuming a plane has about 100 passenger per flight in average, that's $4/passenger. I can see airlines like Southwest making wifi free just like how they provide checked bags for free.

Also, to me free wifi sounds better than those laggy entertainment systems I never use.

> I can see airlines like Southwest making wifi free just like how they provide checked bags for free.

Southwest is not providing free bags out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s purely a profit-oriented business decision.

- Free bags means fewer people putting carry on bags in the overhead bins.

- Fewer carry on bags means faster boarding.

- Faster boarding means less time spent at the gate.

- Less time spent at the gate means the plane is in the air for more time.

- More time the plane is in the air means more profit made (generally speaking, provided loads, schedule and routing allows)

To be fair, this doesn’t consider the fuel costs of the extra 46 kg or so of baggage allowance that passengers have, the additional check-in desks that need to be “kiosked” and/or staffed, etc.

I’m sure it still works out for them, but it’s far from obvious and probably depends on many passengers not maximizing their allowance.

Starlink may provide other value to airlines besides fees from passengers. Streaming high resolution telemetry, or spying on their employees with webcams, or something like that.

A contract with say, American Airlines, will most certainly not be anywhere near 25K/month per plane.

And, knowing Musk, a way to play loose with the books. I can imagine a bunch of these reservations "financially delivered" to prop up SpaceX's numbers, which aren't looking hugely healthy.

I don't disagree but I'm curious where you are getting the data about SpaceX's numbers? Do you have information rights on their bonds or common stock?

In which world is SpaceX not healthy? I mean, _seriously_. Investors are trampling over each other for the opportunity to get into their private stock buybacks. They've had a record number of launches this year and Starlink is coming out of "unproven" territory and into "let's sell this" territory. Plus they just successfully tested inter-satellite links.

You best anchor yourself to the ground... lest you drift away.

> knowing Musk, a way to play loose with the books

Do you have any source that shows that he's committing such fraud?

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