Boeing uses potatoes to test wi-fi (2012)
bbc.com
bbc.com
The time prior to that, the outlet had been so abused that the plug just fell out of the socket.
The time prior to that, the plane did not have the advertised features.
Perhaps the signal strength is great, but the actual problems I as a passenger experience seem to be a bit divorced from the potatoes here.
¹"You can crash an outlet?" I'm an SRE. I can do anything. Plug plug into outlet, green light turns off. Wait like 5s, light turns back on. 1s later, green light turns off. Loop. It's a crashloop, essentially. No power provided.
Even the planes with 110 outlets are heavily current limited. I tried to plug in a USB charger and use it to charge a phone and tablet at the same time, and the outlet just shut off until I disconnected one of the devices.
I should have clarified that this was an A/C outlet, I guess.
> Even the planes with 110 outlets are heavily current limited. I tried to plug in a USB charger and use it to charge a phone and tablet at the same time, and the outlet just shut off until I disconnected one of the devices.
Perhaps, but if the outlet can't supply the current for typical/reasonable uses one might use an outlet for on a plane, and just shuts down, is there an outlet?
Particularly if you never tell me the limits of the outlet. Ideally … that'd be up-front, but I sort of understand that to most people this is a minor part of the flight, so I'd probably settle for "written on the outlet". It'd just be cool to know if I'm going to be bored to tears once I'm tired of reading.
The point is more that advertising "we have $service", but then delivering a quality of service for $service that amounts to "unusable for any real-world use case" is bullshit.
But fine, power is too hopelessly complex to actually implement in a manner that would be useful to passengers. So the WiFi: my last flight was 99% packet loss, and 7,000ms+ ping times for the 1% that was delivered. Just making it through the idiotic MitM portal was a quest, but again the resultant service is utterly unusable.
The legal principle I'd point to here is "fitness for a particular purpose". The service was sold, and when it was sold, there was, in the buyer's mind, the assumption that it was fit for a particular purpose: reasonable usage of WiFi mid flight (e.g., low bandwidth, tolerably high latency uses; I'm not expecting to be able to game or stream a movie) or to power a portable device one might find in the average person's carry-on.
But it's just something between false advertising and enshittification. The airlines want to deliver a service, perhaps at one time they did, but they've not employed the people necessary to maintain it, and when the customer is shorted, there's zero recourse for the customer.
¹… of course, I end up being one of those drawing 0 since, you know, the fucking outlet is broken.
You need many very low power base stations at spaced out channels to make this work. Nowadays WiFi 7 provides some nice anti-congestion and channel optimization features as well, but back then, one slow device was all it took to render wifi useless.
Potato submarines!