> initial page elements will take up to a second to appear.
This happens to me too on my home 50Mbps connection.
How Inflight Wifi Works
111–120 of 129 posts
Re: How Inflight Wifi Works
#112Re: How Inflight Wifi Works
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Business idea - Free WiFi on all flights as part of your ticket price! Mains power supply provided for $30/hour ;) New TSA policy: Li-ion/Li-poly/etc batteries cannot be more than 20% charged for safety.
You joke, but sometimes I wonder if the low fluid ounce limit was a conspiracy by Big Shampoo and the Toothpaste Trust.
I would look at Big Bottled Water too.
Re: How Inflight Wifi Works
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
They haven't even bothered to try. 3" more legroom for $40? No. Human-sized seat? I'd pay double the price. But I'm not going to pay 5x as much.
They haven't even bothered to try. Sure they have. All three of the big legacy US airlines have some form of extra-legroom economy: American has Main Cabin Extra, Delta has Comfort+ and United has Economy Plus. The problem is those seats cost more, and people shop for airfares based solely on the price they see in a search engine. Airlines have tried all sorts of tricks to get people to buy the nicer seat. They've tr…
I specifically mentioned that I was looking for a human-sized seat, not more legroom. I'm not unusually tall, I'm an average-sized male adult, and I'd like to have somewhere to put my arm. I don't really enjoy having my elbows pinned to my sides for 4 or 6 or 14 hours.
Re: How Inflight Wifi Works
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
They haven't even bothered to try. 3" more legroom for $40? No. Human-sized seat? I'd pay double the price. But I'm not going to pay 5x as much.
Alaska Airlines has more often than not convinced me to upgrade to first class. The one way ticket will be ~$100-150 steerage and ~$200 for first class, which gets me that human sized seat and personal space, usb and standard power. That upgrade is worth it to me. $50-100 to reduce my anxiety for a few hours? sold.
I'd be all over that. I recently flew a short Virgin America flight where I only had to pay $190 instead of $140 to get a first class seat. Frankly, I'd pay double for every flight I'm on to get even half that much comfort. The seats were massive, the legroom insane (could not touch the seat in front of me with my feet if I tried), full recliner, etc.
You'd think there would be a logical in-between, but in a world where 20% more space in business class costs you 5x as much, there's no room for the average customer to have a pleasant flight.
Re: How Inflight Wifi Works
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't even have to be high-end brands. Don't think I've ever bought Levi's shirts or jeans in the UK....
Wait for sales. The Levi jeans I wear are ~£80 a pair, but often come around at £40. Incidentally I believe Levi jeans in the US are made in Mexico, whereas the ones on the market in the UK are all made in Bangladesh. Some denimheads are convinced the Mexican ones are of poorer workmanship. Different washes (colours) are also priced differently and the cotton may vary between them even if they have the same cut (numb…
As I've never bought them in the UK, I don't watch UK prices. I've bought most of mine from JC Penney in the Boulevard mall in Las Vegas, and they often have deals, or will do deals (20% off). I remember getting five black 501 shirts for under $150, though that was a few years ago now ;-)
I usually stock up because (a) you can't rely on companies to keep the style identical -- not even Levi's; and (b) the price is only going to go up. They do last, so I still have several shirts I've never worn.
Re: How Inflight Wifi Works
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
They haven't even bothered to try. 3" more legroom for $40? No. Human-sized seat? I'd pay double the price. But I'm not going to pay 5x as much.
They haven't even bothered to try. Sure they have. All three of the big legacy US airlines have some form of extra-legroom economy: American has Main Cabin Extra, Delta has Comfort+ and United has Economy Plus. The problem is those seats cost more, and people shop for airfares based solely on the price they see in a search engine. Airlines have tried all sorts of tricks to get people to buy the nicer seat. They've tr…
It'd be one thing if the basic seats were basic but actually felt like you could sit in them four hours at a stretch without seriously jeopardizing your health. As it is, if the airlines could get away with packing people into 80cm by 80cm by 80cm crates they damn well would, and they'd charge $80 to upgrade to a full meter.
Re: How Inflight Wifi Works
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: How Inflight Wifi Works
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: How Inflight Wifi Works
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 handover…
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.