Delta’s domestic wireless coverage is excellent, and through January 2 thirty minutes of it is free thanks to a partnership with eBay.
After your 30 minutes are up, you can still surf eBay for free. Or of course you can buy the service.
It still mystifies me that inflight wifi adoption remains so limited, I’d think more travelers would want to be connected and furthermore during prime business travel hours would be expensing it to their employers.
Of course, the more passengers that are using it the greater the service degradation seems to be, that’s going to be something of a curse for the service over time I think — as there becomes enough use to make the service economical, the quality of the service is going to deteriorate. So there will need to be greater bandwidth than is offered today.
This holiday promo (and there may be others coming down the pike, perhaps with American or ALaska? in the past companies such as Google have covered the cost) will help flesh out where they are along that spectrum.
Lack of inflight wireless is one of the great ffrustrations that I have with United, though there are plans to rectify that. And I wish American was more predictable at booking rather than having to find out 24 hours in advance whether or not your flight will be equipped. Even though adoption rates so far have tended to be low, there’s little question that all but the shortest hops will need to be wired in the future.
Here’s hoping these promotions prove the point, help introduce customers to the service, demonstrate the need to scale up capacity, and make the inflight wireless project sustainable economically. (I still remember meeting the beleaguerd Boeing Connexion folks about five years back.)
That’s the number one thing that moved me from being a 1.7K UA flyer to a 1K/PM split — the reliable Internet connection. UA SWUs are still way more valuable than DL ones, but a SWU improves eight hours of my life. Internet service improves over 150 hours.
Posted from a DL flight, natch.
I was actually on an AA flight this weekend that was supposed to have GOGO on it (said it on the ticket and they even announced it at the beginning of the flight) but it never actually was available. Not sure what happened.
Do any airlines offer free wi-fi to status holders? Seems like a no-brainer as far as incentives go…
@DBest surprisingly no..
I don’t know. In-flight wifi is not something I’m looking forward to. Similar to how I feel about phone service in the subways, I treasure those few min/hours, when I’m not connected.
I was recently on a Delta flight and was just wondering if you could clarify this for me. During my flight I was told that it was free to surfing certain merchants’ websites. I was just curious if the eBay deal was only for surfing their website or anything on the web?
I’ve twice experienced issues with Delta where it said that too many devices were connected, and that I would only be able to connect with a lower bandwidth device. Sure enough, my iPhone could connect just fine but my laptop was blocked until users disconnected.
Emirates is operating 11 A380 with full passenger loads using OnAir Wi-Fi. The flight was $25.00 for 100Mb of data. Lots of bandwidth for the ntire flight. No problems in connecting and using this service. GoGo may have hit the edge of their inexpensive ATG capacity.