Posted by Seth on November 9, 2011 under Flying, Internet, Trip Reports | 
I have never really felt that the value proposition of the gogo service was particularly great. The cost of the service is generally high and the service quality has not been spectacular. Still, on my flight home this past Monday I had some work to get done and doing it on the plane would save me a few hours. Plus it was billable time so I could easily justify the cost of the service for the sake of getting the billable revenue. So I gave it a try.
Shortly after departure from LAX I opened up my laptop and signed on. I paid the fee and tried to connect to the services I needed to get the work done. Performance was, sadly, poor. Web pages were timing out and the non-web services I needed to use were barely functional. I loaded up speedtest.net and gave it a go. The numbers weren’t pretty:
Ouch.
I tweeted the results and the gogo twitter account got back to me right away, suggesting that I wait a few minutes and try again. Or I could contact their chat support online. A few minutes later the numbers were no better:
Time to contact support.
I explained my situation and went back and forth on the details with the chat folks. Ultimately, this was the conclusion we came to:
You’re on a busy route; it’s possible there is a large number of users on your flight, which can affect speeds. Unfortunately, we’re not able to ‘fix’ bandwidth issues, as the factors that can cause them – including location relative to our towers and the number of users on your flight – are all outside our control.
Not so helpful, actually.
They offered me a freebie for the next time I need to use the service, which I guess is OK, but given that it barely works on the flights where I’d actually want to use it I’m not so sure what the value is there.
I’m not so surprised by this problem; last time I tried to use it I had similar performance issues. Then I blamed it on the fact that more folks were using it because it was free that day. Apparently that’s not the issue at all. Oh, and it wasn’t just me. Runway Girl was having similar troubles on her westbound flight; we tweeted about it a bit.
In the end the service just doesn’t work for me, at least not well enough that I’m willing to pay for it. So I’ll be saving my money and reading or writing on the planes instead. Probably better for me overall anyways.
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Posted by Seth on November 7, 2011 under Hotel, Internet, Trip Reports |
Yesterday morning I found myself in need of a hotel in or near Burbank, California. No big deal, right? I did my typical search across a few different sites (ended up booking via hotels.com because I was redeeming my Welcome Rewards points) and found a room at the Ramada by the airport that was the right price and got decent enough reviews (though mine won’t be so glowing, I expect). Once I had that as a basis for my price comparisons I did what I normally do next – check the page of the hotel operator to see if they’ve got a better deal or a best rate guarantee I can take advantage of. And that’s where they lost me.
Perhaps more appropriately I should say that Ramada lost Burbank. Typing Burbank, California into their search engine returned the following map results:
Apparently we’re moving Burbank 300 miles northwest this weekend. Go figure.
Not the first random hotel booking site that I’ve found cannot get geography and I got around it (searched for Los Angeles and scrolled up the map to Burbank) but pretty impressive that they can fail so badly.
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Posted by Seth on October 27, 2011 under Internet, News |
There was plenty of news in this morning’s quarterly earnings call for United Airlines. As per usual, most of it was focused on the financial numbers but there were a few interesting bits that came out which are actually of interest to passengers rather than investors. Wedged between a screed about potential new taxes on the industry and mention of aircraft retirements was a very simple statement by CEO Jeff Smisek: Wifi is coming to the mainline fleet.
I was actually caught a bit off-guard by the comment and haven’t seen the transcript yet to confirm if he qualified that statement with the word "domestic" but apparently that doesn’t matter much as rumors surrounding the announcement suggest that it quite likely has potential to be a global deployment. That’s HUGE.
Subsidiary Continental has been dancing with LiveTV for a few years now, trying to get some in-flight internet into service from the provider. LiveTV hasn’t been able to deliver, however, and that’s been quite frustrating. The recent successful launch of ViaSat-1 will allow LiveTV to get their service up and running next year but apparently that’s not sufficient for United; they’re moving on. At least for part of the fleet. Apparently the new announcement might only be for the subsidiary United portion of the fleet, with LiveTV keeping the Continental portion.
The winner of the contract is apparently Panasonic Systems according to Runway Girl, who has great sources for this type of information. Panasonic currently supports in-flight wifi via a Ku-band satellite network. This is slower than the Ka-band service that LiveTV/ViaSat are launching but it is also available today. And Panasonic has announced that they will have a combination Ku/Ka antenna available reasonably soon which should allow the product to scale up as the network options become available. Oh, and Panasonic has a partnership with ViaSat similar to LiveTV so they might even end up using the same satellite but via a different provider.
Definitely a huge development in this space with lots more details to come.
Posted by Seth on October 19, 2011 under Internet, News |
LiveTV, the in-flight connectivity subsidiary of JetBlue, took a major step forward in their efforts to provide satellite-based Internet connectivity today with the launch of ViaSat-1 from the International Launch Services facility in Kazakhstan. The launch gets the satellite into orbit over the United States and provides the necessary signal coverage and bandwidth capacity to allow for the trial of the service in the aircraft in the coming months and its eventual deployment. The service will run in the Ka spectrum band which provides more bandwidth and lower operating costs than the Ku-band which is currently in production with Row44.
Next up is confirmation that the satellite actually is successfully in orbit and that it is functioning correctly. But, for now, everything looks good on the launch.
In addition to JetBlue the service is going to be used by United Airlines subsidiary Continental as well.
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Posted by Seth on October 3, 2011 under Internet |
Market research company In-Stat has published a new report on the up-take of in-flight internet users and the numbers are, well, interesting. The company is very bullish on the technology, suggesting that by 2015 it should cross the $1.5Bn annual revenue mark. The company also suggests that in-flight wifi is no longer "a competitive differentiator, it is now simply viewed in the US market as a competitive requirement."
The strange thing about this last claim, however, is that the number of folks actually using the service is still incredibly low. Yes, the take rate has increased from 4% to 7% year over year according to their stats. That is a reasonably significant jump percentage-wise. But it still isn’t a ton of users.
And, more significantly, it is hard to comprehend how a senior analyst at the research company can claim that a product used by such a small percentage of customers is anything close to a competitive requirement. There are 90%+ of the passengers who apparently do not care at all about in-flight wifi as they aren’t using it. It is also not clear from the teaser part of the report how many of the users were willing to pay for the service versus using it for free.
Yes, in-flight internet will eventually be a compelling product and it will be a competitive requirement for airlines. That day is coming. It just isn’t here yet, despite reports such as this one.
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Posted by Seth on August 22, 2011 under Internet, News |
It seems that in-flight entertainment and connectivity provider LiveTV just cannot catch a break in getting their in-flight internet product to a deliverable state. First there was the Kiteline product, built on the back of the old Airfone bandwidth spectrum and only ever live on a single plane. That project fell apart when they were unable to get a functional antenna produced for a wider install. From there they moved on to a satellite-based solution, promising higher speeds and lower operating costs. Assuming they can get it in the air.
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| JetBlue‘s BetBlue, the only commercial plane to fly with the LiveTV Kiteline internet service in operation. |
That effort hit a speed bump this week when International Launch Services (ILS), the company tasked with sending the necessary satellite from partner ViaSat into space this year, suffered a failure on Sunday when attempting to launch the Ekspress-AM4 communications satellite. Neither that launch nor that satellite are directly related to the ViaSat efforts, but the failure likely means a full stand-down of ILS’s operations until they can figure out what happened and how to prevent it. Given that the ViaSat launch has already been postponed due to "scheduling conflicts with other priority launches" it seems that having the launch date slip again wouldn’t be all that hard to imagine. When the project was originally announced the intended launch date was "early 2011."
On the plus side, the folks at ViaSat are saying that they do not expect this potential delay to impact the LiveTV rollout as they weren’t planning on having any aircraft equipped until early 2012 anyways. But with the rather checkered history of this bird (it was damaged earlier in the year while being transported for testing) and the ongoing delays – plus the rather suspect track record of LiveTV in delivering – it is hard to have a ton of faith in the previously announced timeline.
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Posted by Seth on May 6, 2011 under Internet, News |
American Airlines announced this week that they are extending their partnership with in-flight internet provider Aircell, the company behind the gogo service. There are two main components to the announcement, one covering internet connectivity and the other addressing streaming media. On the internet front the company has committed to expanding their gogo deployment to cover more than 140 additional aircraft in domestic service. The streaming media offering, however, is an industry first.
The service will leverage the wifi network that the gogo service currently operates on and will provide access to movies and TV shows via a locally cached copy that resides in the airplane. Users will access the media through their own wireless devices rather than through in-seat or overhead screens on the aircraft. This move is essentially a bet that in-flight entertainment is now no longer dependent on the screen that the airline can provide and instead focused on the content which can be delivered on any screen that the customer might happen to have with them. By focusing on the content rather than the delivery mechanism the company can offer greater content variety while keeping both the weight and costs of the system down.
One challenge that American will face with this approach is that many consumer devices will need power to stream the media for the duration of a flight and, to date, the carrier has only had limited power outlet distribution through their aircraft. The first planes to have the streaming service are 767-200s used on transcon routes and they do have power so that should help, at least initially.
On the wifi deployment side of the game, American announced that they will be deploying the gogo service on 93 of the company’s 757 aircraft as well as 50 more MD-80 series planes. The installation will start this summer and is in addition to the previously announced plans to fit all of the carrier’s 737-800s with the service. By pursuing the fitting of essentially their entire domestic fleet American has joined Delta, Virgin America, AirTran and Southwest in the plan to offer wifi on all domestic flights.
Of course, all the wifi deployment is only useful to the airlines if it actually makes them money, and thus far evidence suggests that still isn’t happening. Recent reports are still noting that wifi adoption rates are hovering in the 5-10% range, depending on the report. Those reports are also suggesting that the demand for screens still outweighs the demand for wifi, though the numbers are shifting in the favor of wifi. Only time will tell if having the early deployment of the connectivity will provide the airlines with a benefit versus the later adopters, notably JetBlue and Continental/United Airlines which are banking on Ka-band satellite services rather than the cellular or Ku-band options currently available via gogo or Row44, respectively.
Posted by Seth on March 22, 2011 under Internet, News |
When Continental Airlines announced their deal with LiveTV to provide in-flight television service a couple years ago there was an additional piece to the deal. LiveTV was also supposed to provide in-flight internet service via their Kiteline product. It was going to be lighter (i.e. cheaper) for the airlines and cheaper for passengers, offering basic connectivity for passengers in the air.
As time marched on, however, that plan drifted away and then was finally shelved as LiveTV eventually admitted that the Kiteline project was dead. They never managed to get the antenna built the way they needed it and ultimately they decided to let the project die. It was too little, too late at that point to be a competitive service.
Fast forward to September 2010 where JetBlue announced that the LiveTV product was going to space. Rather than sticking with a terrestrial solution, they are going satellite-based, using the latest Ka-band technology available at the time. Actually, it isn’t even available yet. The ViaSat satellite is due to launch in 2011 and the service will come online once that happens.
Continental executed a letter of intent with LiveTV today to expand the carrier’s DirecTV installation to include the new ViaSat-based product. Just like they intended to offer the Kiteline solution a couple years ago. The first installs are not expected into aircraft until 2012 and the service is expected to be installed on the roughly 200 aircraft that Continental has currently fitted with DirecTV service or in line to be installed.
This is just the first of many steps to getting the service into production and on to the aircraft. Lots of details to still work out, including things like an install schedule and FAA approval of the hardware, not to mention actually getting a working product operating. Still, it is good to see progress on this front.
Faster, cheaper internet connectivity is a good thing to have.
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Posted by Seth on February 23, 2011 under Internet, News |
About a month ago the news came out that Verizon Wireless was killing their unlimited international data plans for all smartphone devices. Not only was this a huge blow to folks who travel a lot in terms of roaming costs, but it was also rather unexpected as there was no announcement that the plan was going away before it abruptly disappeared. It seems that the company has received enough negative feedback on this change that they are now reconsidering their position.
If you have ever had the plan previously and were following the financially sound practice of turning it off and on as needed it seems that you have one last chance to get it back. Many users are reporting that they are able to get the plan put back on their account "one last time" as an exception to the new policies. While this means it will still be more expensive to have the plan on "full time" rather than as needed, it is definitely less expensive than the new roaming rates, especially if you travel farther afield than Europe and the Caribbean.
Make the call now if you want the plan back. No telling how long VZW will keep this grandfathering option available.
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Posted by Seth on December 16, 2010 under Internet, News |
Without much publicity United Airlines has installed the in-flight Internet service offering from provider Row44 in one of their 757-200 aircraft. Ship N593UA was fitted with the satellite-based system and re-entered service with the connectivity active on December 3, 2010. The install is a trial to evaluate customer uptake and performance.
The move is somewhat surprising given that United has already installed the gogo service on their p.s. aircraft. It is even more surprising given the decision earlier this year by merger partner Continental to scrap their trial of any in-flight internet service options following the announcement from LiveTV that their previously promised Kiteline service would not be offered. Still, it is nice to see the carriers continuing to evaluate options and grow the connectivity options.
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In-flight internet coverage continues to spread
JetBlue to offer awesome in-flight broadband – eventually
Aircell loses a customer
End of the line for Kiteline
