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Flying High WiFi |
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Posted by SelkirkTMO on Wed Sep 2 03:44:30 2015 In-flight WiFi is a neat feature when you're stuck on a metal tube. Alas, in-flight WiFi not only is expensive as hell lately, but the performance downright blows goats. Looks like the ontapanoor behind GoGo has no idea of how to keep the customers happy for cheap ...GoGo CEO: High Prices, Bad Service: 'Nothing to Apologize For' by Karl Bode Tuesday Sep 01 2015 17:19 EDT In-flight broadband company GoGo has been taking quite a media beating, lately. Bloomberg recently penned an article stating that GoGo is "basically Comcast at 35,000 feet," thanks to the fact that it holds an 85% market share of the in-flight broadband market. As performance has progressively gotten worse under load, pricing has consistently been nudged skyward, resulting in a generally annoyed customer base dulled to the novelty of broadband at 30,000 feet. Wi-Fi service on transcontinental flights now cost between $28 and $40, up from around $18 in 2012. As the New York Times notes, GoGo also uses dynamic pricing to raise or lower prices based on projected demand: quote:The company uses a method called dynamic pricing, in which it tries to forecast the demand for Wi-Fi on each flight and scale pricing accordingly. So the prices for the full durations of transcontinental flights also change each day: Gogo charges the most, $40, on Mondays and Thursdays; Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays cost $34; and Saturdays are the cheapest, at $28. GoGo CEO Michael Small says the company has nothing to apologize for: quote:“We’re starting to have millions of users, so it’s getting more and more congested, and we have raised prices, which you typically do when you have more demand than you have supply,” he said. “There’s nothing to apologize for. We have trouble finding a business in America that does anything differently.” So all companies fail to anticipate demand and scale operations accordingly? GoGo is of course suddenly getting a lot of mainstream media attention because the company has been promising that its 2ku upgrades will dramatically improve things. The upgrades, which should start arriving later this year, will ultimately provide 70 Mbps per plane -- a notable improvement from the 3 Mbps or so per plane currently on offer. --- Dewwwwd ... if you want to be "Air Comcast" there's a very cheap and simple solution for your problem. You already have a computer in the sky to serve up that stuff, all you need to do is when the first user clicks for www.cnn.com or any other website, CACHE that shit on an SSD drive. They weigh less than a pound extra and can store many gigabytes of websites that everyone's going to hit up that can be served locally right there on the plane once the first user has hit it. This is how cable companies can offer gigabyte speed and still connect to the intertubes over a piddly OC3 fiber or two at their head end. It's all about caching popular stuff and serving it up locally from your own server. For popular sites like news and weather sites that update frequently, a refresh of the cache every 5 minutes or so does the trick for the big leagues. Try it sometime, fucktard. |
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