Inflight Wi-Fi is something that's becoming increasingly important to business travelers, and it's interesting to see the different approaches airlines take towards it. In particular, it's interesting how differently airlines seem to perceive the elasticity of demand for the service among passengers. On one end of the spectrum you have Emirates, which is now basically…
Continue reading: Airberlin Inflight Wifi Coming Fleetwide
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"They view inflight wifi as part of their core product offering rather than a profit center, which I think is brilliant"
3 Emirates segments in the last 2 weeks for me, and the internet was only usable on 1. The other 2 took 5+ minutes to load per page. Even the 1 that did work, it was pretty slow.
Contrast that to Lufthansa (10+ segments this year) or Etihad (1 segment in the last 2 weeks) where the wifi is always usable and very snappy (for being 5 miles above the earth, anyway) and at ~$20 for the whole flight, the cost is not unreasonable at all.
This leads me to believe that there is not enough bandwidth currently available to be able to offer free internet to the entire plane. Rationing the bandwidth via a pay-wall (that most people are, evidently, unwilling to pay) is the only way to make it work for now.
Offering it on shorthauo aircraft first is "the opposite of what most airlines are doing"? We can quibble about the quality of AA/US, UA, and DL....but pretty sure they are still quite sizeable airlines and have followed this same short haul first strategy.
Lucky,
the simple reason why they are installing WiFi on their short-haul fleet first might be, that AB has quite a share of business travellers on short-haul flights (thanks to cost-cutting measures across industries requiring short-haul travel in economy class...), who are probably more willing to pay the price for internet access than the leisure, bargain-seeking long-haul traveller to the US or Caribbean, who snatched his return ticket for ~550$...