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.
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