Originally Posted by
Kacee
Interestingly enough, that story is mostly about the Inmarsat Global Xpress ("GX") product which they thought would be live right now. But the folks at ILS in Baikonur keep blowing up rockets so the launches continue to take delays. The SpaceX failure on Sunday isn't helping things, either. Capacity demands far outstrip supply and it isn't like terrestrial service where you can just pull more fiber.
Originally Posted by
phkc070408
I can see retaining the gogo on the p.s. planes since it was already installed on such, at least until the rest of the fleet is done.
The company has already committed to installing the Gogo 2Ku satellite-based system on at least part of the p.s. fleet. I'd bet that the whole fleet gets it eventually but that deal is not yet signed.
Originally Posted by
phkc070408
As long as UA needed the Ku to go international, and since they manage that themselves, they should have put the Ka on the UX planes, and then changed the p.s. birds to either Ka or Ku. Then the entire fleet could be managed by UA and they could offer both entire flight packages and/or hourly passes.
The Ka radome and other hardware is not certified for the 70-seat RJs. It only recently got approval in Brazil for the E190 and that now needs to be replicated in the USA for install on the JetBlue 190s. The system is also heavier and reportedly a bit more expensive both CapEx and OpEx versus the Gogo ATG/ATG4 hardware.
Originally Posted by
phkc070408
What I'm curious about is why they installed Ka on the non-DTV 737-900s rather than installing Ku. They fly outside of the continental US limits quite often, but that's for a different thread.
Because they had the contract with Thales/LiveTV to do so. And, at the time, the company was able to deliver the goods. Eventually ViaSat-2 will launch and that will fill in the Ka gaps for the 737 routes except to Hawaii. The part where it is faster and cheaper as a consumer is nice, too.
Originally Posted by
bldr1k
For me $10 for a 2-3 hour flight and $15 for a 4-6 hour flight is reasonable. If it is above that then I don't even bother. It seems like these price points result in mostly business users who usually don't waste the bandwidth browsing the web, but are still justifiable.
And that's exactly what Gogo wants right now. It simply doesn't have the bandwidth available to do anything else.
Originally Posted by
enviroian
...and it's not new on aircraft either.
Depends on your definition of new, I suppose. Wifi on planes has been here about 5 years this time around (I'm skipping the Connexion by Boeing era because it was an abject commercial failure). And total capacity available on board has increased significantly with each generation of hardware. Demand continues to outstrip supply and classic Econ 101 says you raise prices or increase supply to solve that. There's no way to quickly increase supply so in the interim you limit demand.