Some airlines offer free wifi, but the ticket prices are usually higher. There’s definitely a pretty large cost to offer wifi on an airplane. Most of it these days is satellite based, and there are large antennas on top of the airplane in a dome shaped structure. This increases drag requiring a slight increase in fuel burn. Over time that adds up. The prices here do seem high, considering you only get a small amount of bandwidth. The 80MB option can be blown through just by viewing photos.
Yeah but data rate caps are money grab bullshit and everyone knows it.
If they really wanted to measure it per what it costs them it’d be unlimited with speed caps, just that doesn’t make nearly as much money
And like any right drag increase(by extension fuel) would be easily lost to favorable or unfavorable winds, the noise is so small considering it is a joke - the extra $0.01 per flight ain’t gonna cost them the $50 per passenger they’re charging (made up numbers but I’m not gonna whip out drag calculations just yet lmao)
If their upstream data provider charges them per megabyte, it doesn’t make sense to give away unlimited internet.
Plus, the price needs to be high, or internet access will be too slow to be useful anyway.
Total available bandwidth is between 5 and 15 megabits per second for the entire plane, with very recent technological developments supposedly raising the speed cap to 200mbps. If you’re in the latest model with the best connection available (flying over land + in range of backing satellites) you’ll get maybe 2mbps in a plane with 100 people, at latencies of up to a second, but more likely you’re going to be stuck at a tenth of that.
“Pay $50 to watch tiktok on the plane for a short while” is easier to sell than “now with WiFi you can barely text over”. Making people save data helps improve everyone’s experience.
Some airlines offer free wifi, but the ticket prices are usually higher. There’s definitely a pretty large cost to offer wifi on an airplane. Most of it these days is satellite based, and there are large antennas on top of the airplane in a dome shaped structure. This increases drag requiring a slight increase in fuel burn. Over time that adds up. The prices here do seem high, considering you only get a small amount of bandwidth. The 80MB option can be blown through just by viewing photos.
Yeah but data rate caps are money grab bullshit and everyone knows it.
If they really wanted to measure it per what it costs them it’d be unlimited with speed caps, just that doesn’t make nearly as much money
And like any right drag increase(by extension fuel) would be easily lost to favorable or unfavorable winds, the noise is so small considering it is a joke - the extra $0.01 per flight ain’t gonna cost them the $50 per passenger they’re charging (made up numbers but I’m not gonna whip out drag calculations just yet lmao)
Should be traffic shaping instead of data caps.
One can text at 50kib/s and the other can stream at 2 mbit/s or something like that.
If their upstream data provider charges them per megabyte, it doesn’t make sense to give away unlimited internet.
Plus, the price needs to be high, or internet access will be too slow to be useful anyway.
Total available bandwidth is between 5 and 15 megabits per second for the entire plane, with very recent technological developments supposedly raising the speed cap to 200mbps. If you’re in the latest model with the best connection available (flying over land + in range of backing satellites) you’ll get maybe 2mbps in a plane with 100 people, at latencies of up to a second, but more likely you’re going to be stuck at a tenth of that.
“Pay $50 to watch tiktok on the plane for a short while” is easier to sell than “now with WiFi you can barely text over”. Making people save data helps improve everyone’s experience.
Well yes. It really depends how your ISP sells you the service and how you resell the service.
Wasn’t aware how small the bandwidth is. Neat to know