Why is it taking U.S. airlines so long to offer in-flight Wi-Fi?

So let's get the question clarified: Why don't cash-strapped US carriers take their planes offline to add this expensive, FAA-certified equipment to their aircraft?

And, once the equipment in installed, how do carriers make back that expense? Do they give it away, hoping that customers will choose their airline over others because it has wifi and not just on the cost of the seat as usual? Every plane is already packed. Where do the gains come from?

The external antennas also add drag to the fuselage, which means more fuel to burn and more money lost there. Who pays for that? Who convinces the flight attendants to suddenly become tech support? They're busy rebooting the in-flight entertainment systems three times per trip as it is.

I work at the largest IFE vendor in the world, and I can tell you that current satellite networking implementations would not be able to support a full aircraft. So if they did offer it, they would have to price it very high to keep an appropriate level of service.

I paid 30 Euros for 'net access on a lufthansa flight and only saw only 3 other people in the Economy cabin using it.

This article is extremely misleading. Delta has 100% coverage for their own fleet.

They do have a significant number of short-haul flights offered by affiliates under the "Delta Connection" brand -- these are all very small planes where you might have 30 minutes to use your laptop between reaching altitude and starting descent. Even so, Delta is equipping these planes with wifi, too.

Someone isn't doing a good job of reading or understanding their data on Delta, and that makes me question the rest of the conclusions...

The U.S. currently has better coverage than Europe. Only a handful of carriers are offering wifi in Europe. KLM, Air France are experimenting. Norwegian offers wifi. Lufthansa offers wifi on transatlantic flights. The reason for this is Gogo, who is providing nearly all the wifi in the U.S. Gogo has made wifi relatively easy for U.S. carriers to adopt. There is nothing yet equivalent to Gogo in Europe.

Separately, Gogo is expanding its in-flight bandwidth. I'm looking forward to that. http://thebat-sf.com/2012/11/13/gogo-to-upgrade-inflight-wi-...

I can understand this being a priority on routes that take longer than 10 hours. But, whats wrong with working offline, or reading during that time? Its not like you're going to be able to pull down large amounts of data, or view realtime video.

Because I fly Southwest so much, I get free WiFi when available. Of my ten or attempts at using it, I've had no connectivity at least three times. Of those, perhaps five attempts resulted in connectivity so slow that it was only useful for background email checking and painfully slow web browsing. The remaining two "successful" uses had a 128K-ish downstream at best. Ping times (to whatever www.google.com resolved to) were 500+ ms at best and multi-second at worst. Periods of flakiness lasting a few minutes at a time were common. So, unless I have some urgent usage requirement, I just stay offline to avoid the hassle and anger.

Although I tend to check bags to not be a part of the "stuff the overheads bin" battle on most flights, Wi-Fi is the only extra I'll pay for on a plane. I've got no interest in stale food, alcohol, duty free, extra legroom or first class.

However, I don't plan my itinerary on it. In particular, Delta is much more likely to have Wi-Fi on the long hop from the hub to the west coast than Usair, but Usair is much more able to find me return flights that aren't a redeye... It took just one night looking at a Texas sky that was the color of television static to decide I'd rather skip Wi-Fi than fly the redeye home.

Question:

What service can I use to find inexpensive flights with flexible travel dates (+-N days) and in-flight wifi?

kayak, my typical goto source for finding tickets, allows me to use flexible dates to minimize my travel costs. I then buy the ticket direct from the airline. It doesn't have wifi information, AFAIK.

routehappy, the site hyped by OP, allows you to sort by happiness and select on features like wifi. However, it doesn't appear to allow flexible travel dates, nor can you sort by price, or even see the price (!?).

What travel aggregator should I use?

When airlines don't allow you to use a kindle during take-off, but you can use a read an actual book... it doesn't give much in terms of encouragement that they are going to start offering free wifi.

Cat6 is cheap nowadays!

This is Apple's opportunity to get involved. I love that I can iMessage from my laptop while on Southwest WiFi. They need to extend it to the phone.

Idea #1: Picture there being two WiFi networks on a plane: Internet Access and iMessage. Connect to iMessage from your iPhone/iPad, let Apple charge your iTunes account if necessary, then conveniently text from your phone. Great for the low-bandwidth situation they're limited by. [yes, you could pay using GoGo etc from your mobile phone and do this, but few know about it and the UX stinks]

Idea #2: Flight trackers as a landing page are nice, but get companies to pay a buck or two to put their product or commercial on your connection page to further subsidize the cost. Picture even a Google/Facebook ad model where you could target your ad to the person's demographic based on their gender and DOB from their frequent flier number.

Idea #3: For the love of God please do a better job throttling and/or blocking bandwidth hogs until the tech is better. Some guy sitting next to me trying to synch 20GB on Dropbox just doesn't seem good for the rest of the plane while my Southwest connection is too slow to load Gmail.