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Comment by CamelCaseName | Hacker News Reader

Sorry if this isn't the thread for it, but is airplane wifi costly to provide?

Is there any hope for a future where all airplane wifi is free?

(Maybe if cellphone plans automatically include satellite wifi?)

In the US, it’s free on Delta for SkyMiles members, which is in turn free to join. It’s also free for everyone on JSX with no strings, and they actually are the first airline I know of to use StarLink.

Additionally it’s free on most US airlines for T-Mobile customers, but only on devices that actually have T-Mobile SIMs (so not most laptops).

The question was if it's costly to provide, not how much customers have to pay

This isn't important; but Delta's "free with SkyMiles" offering is for domestic US travel. For international travel they're still charging $8/hour. Supposedly they may expand the free offering to some flights to Europe though but YMMV.

I have to imagine this comes down to how they provide the Internet connection. Over land they can use cell towers. Over sea they're forced to use satellites.

On AA, the "free one hour for TMO subscribers" through their app doesn't actually check to see if you're using a TMO SIM. It only checks the phone number against their customer list.

After burning up the first free hour I switch to my wife's number, then my kids, etc. It never complains.

You can literally bump the last digit of any T-Mobile number (:

Yeah that should work...for a while. Eventually numbers get ported out and the space fragments. Area codes don't mean much anymore.

Re: T-Mobile - On United you can just set your laptop user agent to a mobile one and sign on with your phone number. Works fine for both the short period and full flight options.

On a recent Hawaiian flight there was free StarLink-powered WiFi. It was free and worked incredibly well.

Zipair, a budget airline subidiary of JAL, offers free Wifi [1] on all their international flights. They operate in the SEA area.

[1] - https://www.zipair.net/en/onboard/service

maybe when we have abundant Starlink capacity, otherwise any satellite-to-ground roundtrip at a reasonable speed is costly

> but is airplane wifi costly to provide

Depends on the location. Over populated land areas, no. Over oceans far from land, yes.

I guess the airlines want to monetize all they can... so probably not.

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