Boeing Scraps In-flight Internet Access

Dreamwalkerofyore writes "According to the BBC, Boeing has recently announced that it has abandoned Connexion, its in-flight broadband service. Said Boeing CEO Jim McNerney: 'Regrettably, the market for this service has not materialized as had been expected. We believe this decision best balances the long-term interests of all parties with a stake in Connexion by Boeing.'"

pricing

[pr0nbot]

Pricing seems to have been not unreasonable

http://www.connexionbyboeing.com/index.cfm?p=cbb.p ricing&lang=en [connexionbyboeing.com]

Internet Flight
Get flat-rate access for your entire flight.

$26.95 for entire flight, including connecting flights within 24 hours of signing in.*

Internet Time
Get 1, 2, or 3 hours of access. Internet Time begins when you sign in and counts down whether you are signed in or not.
Access Price
1 hour $9.95
2 hours $14.95
3 hours $17.95

*Price shown in US dollars. No taxes or duties will be added. Prices are reduced during maintenance periods.

Re:where's the market

[Ponzicar]

So the government convincingly faked every single call made by the passengers to their friends and families? Not a single one of them realized it wasn't really who they thought it was?

Re:where's the market

[Andy Dodd]

False. Cell phones DO work at high altitudes. High altitudes gives them good LOS to multiple cell towers.

What IS true and a scientifically proven fact is that cell phones at high altitudes create unusually high loads on the cellular network. See what I said earlier about good LOS to *multiple* towers? The end result is that instead of appearing as a user on one tower on a given frequency and nowhere else, it appears as a user or a strong interferer on many towers.

The end result is that while a cell network may have the capacity to server N users on the ground per cell, it can only support a total of around N users in the air for ALL cells within LOS of the aircraft. This is why the ban on airborne cell phones was originally an FCC rule, not an FAA one.

Re:pricing

[l0ungeb0y]

Yeah... 27$ for a few hour flight is so ultra cheap.
Considering that most people pay about that much at home for a MONTH of broadband
I'd say pricing was a major sticking point and contributed in no small part to the demise of the service pilot.

Re:pricing

[VoiceOfSanity]

Understand that Connexion was primarily used by long haul (read overseas) airlines. Companies such as Luftansa provided the service for use on many of their flights. The problem was that almost every US airline company did not want to provide the service, even on coast to coast flights. It was a very hard sell, considering that there was (and still is) a very hard push to get cellphone usage approved for use in flight. Why use a guaranteed connection through Connexion when you could simply fire up your wireless adapter from Sprint and hope that you can get a decent enough connection while flying over western Texas, or the Rockies?

Cost certainly was another reason why it wasn't more widely used, but that excuse doesn't fly (pardon the pun) when you consider most corporate flyers are running on expense accounts, and certainly the cost of connecting up can be covered by those accounts. After all, go to Las Vegas and try to find a free wi-fi spot along the Strip, or stay in the hotel and use their Internet services. You'll pay $9.95 a day (or $49.95 a week) for access (and most places are through the television, not wireless). Yes, I know Las Vegas has a wi-fi grid being developed (such as the free access at the airport), but where the hotels are, they have worked hard to keep those free services from being available to the public.

Re:pricing

[DrXym]

Hmm, perhaps the US model is different so I'll refer to GSM. Most likely your plane would be kitted out with a picocell and jammers to ensure you didn't inadvertantly connect to another service. To use your phone, you'd have to "roam" through the picocell and then be raped at whatever phone rate they chose for you to make and receive calls. You'd probably be looking at least 1 euro a minute, and probably more. Other services like texting would also be high.

On the plus side, your phone would be so close to the cell that it would use less power.

Re:Well DUH

[Anonymous Coward]

The restrictions on flights have been lifted, and have for days. Laptops along with everything else are perfectly fine.

The only restriction is on drinks and liquids not purchased within the terminal.

Re:where's the market

[canuck57]

...cell phones work perfectly well at high altitudes..

They do. It is a common misconception that the authorities want cell phones off in flight because of safety. The reason is simple, because the plane is travelling so fast, and the ground system is more or less designed for automobile speeds, the cell system hands off to the next cell very rapidly causing grief for the cell system owners.

It likely will not work when over an unpopulated area, but near cities and main hiways it should. This isn't to say the connection will be stable, it likely will not be. 9/11 worked because they were in a populated area flying relatively low.

Hich costs

[AndyCap]

Of course, it does sound like the costs were out of control if they had 560 people working in what's a very small ISP.

Re:where's the market

[farenka]

Cellular Phones doesn't work at high altitude, at least not in Italy an not on GSM service. A friend of mine worked for Alitalia as a technician and sometimes he flyed on short test flights from Fiumicino Airport (on Boing and Airbus airplanes). Just take off, few minutes around, and landing. He usually go around on the plane to do some checks and there are no flight attendents at all. So one time he didn't turned off his phone just to see what happens. The phone was connected to the network during the take off, but in few minutes he lost the signal at all.

Re:pricing

[rikkards]

And in some cases all you get is Web access and no vpn due to proxy config (Westin in Calgary for example)

Re:pricing

[BenjyD]

By way of comparison, BT Openzone (UK wireless hotspot provider) charges £0.20/minute ($22/hr) for its pay as you go wireless connections in places like train stations etc. There are various voucher options, the equivalent to the "entire flight" option is around $20.

So, compared to that, the prices aren't that bad.

pricing versus performance

[daw]

Those prices might be bearable if the service worked. The real problem was that it didn't. I used it on Lufthansa. It was the worst laggy modem-speed mess, totally unusable. If you're paying by the hour for something, it's pretty infuriating when it stops working completely for five minutes at a time.

I suspect the real reason they weren't doing business was because of the performance, not the price.

I hope Lufthansa will take over this service

[papaia]

During my trips to/from Europe, from/to the US, I always enjoyed this service on Lufthansa's airplanes. I wish they could keep it available, alongside allowance for laptops.

Re:where's the market

[hughk]

I guess he is a GA pilot. Somewhat different circumstances, you are in a slower plane, you fly lower and there isn't so much fuselage around you, especially in the cockpit.

Inside a typical commercial jet, you fly at about 30K feet, the RF has to find its way out through the portholes so the mobile's transmitter automatically ramps up to maximum. You have line of sight to the ground stations but at full cruising altitude, they have antennas tweaked to send out mostly sideways.

It will work, but not very well and you will cause system problems on the ground.

Re:where's the market

[Matje]

yes but they researched it and it turns out to be bonk. There is no safety risk involved with calling from the airplane. That's why both in the EU and US the flight authorities are debating whether to allow GSM calls from the airplane. This was reported in the NY times a while ago.

Re:Well DUH

[hey!]

hI'd think free booze might cost about the same, and people (everyone I know) would definetly fly such an airline.

Ah, this harkens back to the days when "Jet Set" implied a sybaritic life of privilege and pleasure, not an endless grid of boarding and trying catch a few winks of sleep on red eyes. Back in the day before laptops, you took a book on a flight just in case your seatmate was a bore (if you were a bore that was his or hopefully, her problem).

However, it is almost certainly not the case that free booze would be cheaper than keyboards. Booze remains one of the most expensive things that is routinely served. Just ask the casinos, who increasingly have sensors on booze bottles that wire the manager when the bartender is poring long shots. Furthermore, the keyboards are capital expenses, the booze is an operating expense. Over a few dozen flights, you'd have spent a lot more money on booze than on keyboards, if they were installed when the plane was outfitted, not retrofitted.

Re:where's the market

[Andy Dodd]

Was he near a window or not?

Keep in mind that the metal fuselage of the aircraft provides quite a bit of RF shielding and radiation pattern distortion, I would not be surprised if you could use a cell phone near a window but not from an aisle.

It's a fact that people HAVE used cell phones on airplanes before, and back in the old AMPS analog days, the problem of hitting multiple cells was much worse. Not only did it cause interference problems at the additional cells, it often cause people to be billed multiple times for the same call and other such oddities because the network was designed with the assumption that a phone could NEVER be heard from a distance greater than a certain amount.

In the case of GSM, there is an inherent limit on the distance of a phone from a tower, I forget the exact limit. It could potentially cause GSM phones to completely fail above a certain altitiude, but you only need 1000-2000 feet of altitude (extremely low for an airliner) for the assumptions used in designing cellular networks to all go out the window.

Re:Well DUH

[mistered]

You know what they say about making assumptions... As someone who actually used the service, I can assure you it wasn't "$3/minute or more." In fact, I paid around $30 for a transatlantic flight -- which isn't cheap compared to normal wifi access points, but is reasonable in my opinion.

It wasn't the expense to the consumer...

[raehl]

The airlines needed to spend hundreds of thousands per plane to install connexion, something financially strapped airlines wern't exactly clamoring to do.