"Prior to the integration of in-flight Wi-Fi, most airline passengers passed their time at 30,000 feet completely disconnected from the world below them — but these days, that’s a highly uncommon occurrence."
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.
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).
I'm going to counter with my anecdote - of the 6 domestic planes I've been on in the past few months... Only 1 had a working wifi for the entire flight. 2 had no wifi available and the other 3 had connectivity or service issues for at least half of the flight.
Just having a route as wifi capable does not mean you will get wifi on a given flight.
I think you're an unusual case. There are a ton of flights with WiFi these days.
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.
Meh? I'd say the airplane itself is the biggest technical feat. Wi-Fi is like water in the 21st century; it should be free. And without the silly login screens that wreak havoc with various apps on my phone.
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.
I didn't say anything about biggest. I'll note that they typically charge an order of magnitude or two more for the airplane than for the WiFi, so I don't see anything contradictory there.
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.
For the same reason drinking water is free on airplanes. For the same reason it's free to use bathrooms on planes. These are considered basic human necessities. I see internet access becoming a basic human necessity. Sooner or later our devices will "expect" to be connected 24 hours a day, and the applications running on them will make the assumption that internet access is available at all times with smooth handovers between Wi-Fi networks, 4G, and other technologies, and zero interruptions or downtime during handovers.
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.
Curiosly, water is free on airlines because, blood clots and strokes. When water isn't provided, old folks can get blood clots in their legs from being cooped up for hours. Once they got off the plane the clot would move, and very soon it would enter the brain and boom! they'd fall over, usually in the terminal.
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.
Well, when this utopia you imagine comes to fruition, then you can complain about how airplane WiFi ought to be free. I bet it'll be a lot cheaper to provide by then. But for now, let's focus on how things currently are, and how they are is pretty much nobody needs internet access while on a plane, and those who do should be able to afford the $10.
It should be reasonably cheap to provide, even now. Hike all airfares by $0.25, and provide it free. Throttle the bandwidth for people who abuse what the connection is capable of. From a software innovation standpoint this would be a much better situation. In-flight social networks, in-flight CDNs and mesh networks that efficiently deliver mass amounts of video content over limited bandwidth, virtual reality experiences between passengers to kill the time, augmented reality telling you what's interesting on the ground where you're flying, the possibilities are endless, if only we could assume everyone was connected.
I must say, none of what you describe sounds even remotely interesting. It's like one of those articles from the early 90s prognosticating on all the cool stuff the internet would enable, and getting it all terribly wrong. Virtual reality experiences between passengers? Pass.
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.
While its been a long time since I've been on an airplane _without_ Wi-Fi, I don't often see power outlets. And as you alluded to, most of the time its $10 for the duration of that flight, whether its 5 hours or 30 minutes.
What airline are YOU flying? I am usually on a 737 built before cell phones were invented. I consider myself lucky if the SkyMall hasn't been stolen, let alone in-flight Wi-Fi.
You're one of the lucky ones. Almost all my flights have power outlets, which means that some stranger is going to be rooting around my ankles trying to find the damn outlet for the first 20 minutes of the voyage.
In my experience the outlets are always on the back of the seat in front of mine, that floor socket seems like a bad design in a space-cramped setting.
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.