In 2012 I wrote that once bandwidth increases substantially for inflight internet, it would eventually become free (included in ticket price). I predicted that would happen within 10 years. People thought I was nuts, but it makes perfect economic sense so seemed inevitable once bandwidth limitations were overcome.

Since then JetBlue added free internet, others have added it on a more limited basis too, and Southwest, Delta, and Alaska have introduced free inflight messaging. Delta has been trialing free inflight internet.

There’s now a rumor that American Airlines — which aggressively added high speed internet to its domestic fleet — will add free internet as well.

I guess considering the trend (and I know it's something folks have predicted, @garyleff I know has predicted it for a long time,) it may not be that surprising; AA considering free wifi. Presumably will do whatever Delta ends up doing.

— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) July 12, 2019

It should come as no surprise to readers that American is consdering this. I laid out how American thinks about charging for inflight wifi based on internal comments from senior executives last fall.

• It wasn’t possible to offer useful internet free when bandwidth was constrained. You have to allocate internet access as a scarce resource, and do this by charging for it. (That was my original argument seven years ago.)

• Satellite internet is expensive (“an expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars”) so they don’t want to give it away without charge.

• They’re doing live TV and streaming content, and they hoped that would be enough.

• However what other airlines do and customer expectations could force them to give it away to passengers.

As American Airlines Robert Isom told a group of employees in October, despite Delta talking about giving away internet free, American’s “model that we have is that we will be charging for wifi. As we go forward of course we’ll be conscious of the marketplace and make sure we do the right thing.”

I’ve argued that offering inflight internet without extra charge is not something that costs hundreds of millions to give away free, it’s something that you make more money selling as part of a bundle (the way cable tv sells channels in a bundle, where there’s a high fixed cost but very little marginal cost to provide the service to an additional consumer). In this case internet gets bundled with the airline ticket.

It doesn’t surprise me to see Delta, out of the majors, leading here because their strategy is to earn a revenue premium by offering a marginally better product rather than taking United President Scott Kirby’s view that the schedule is the product and the goal is keeping up with the joneses. (It’s no wonder that United’s inflight internet experience makes the airline a non-starter for me).

Of course American Airlines could just follow their playbook from inflight texting: make a big announcement that they planned to offer it for free, and not actually do it.