Originally Posted by
HDQDD
Nice. They're right about how gogo is banking on (and making tons on) non-price sensitive customers. If people were leaving, they would stop raising the prices.
It's hard to imagine 7% of a 757 sharing 3Mbps... That's an average of about 200
Kbps/pax. Even less if some jagoff is streaming video.
Honestly, I didn't realize how superior ViaSat and GEE's networks were.
The 12Mbps figure for ViaSat is likely based on their Exede12 ground-based residential service (
http://www.exede.com) and has nothing to do with their airline based offering. No way could you guarantee that to each and every passenger on a full airplane. Aside from the fact that the bandwidth from the plane to the satellite is probably not sufficient to handle it, a single wifi radio can do maybe 50-100 Mbps. Consider how many radios you'd need for a 200 passenger airplane to allow them all to do 12Mbps simultaneously (aside from the cost, you'd also run into significant channel overlap).
While satellite systems offer higher bandwidth rates, the latency is also much worse. In the real world, it is difficult to achieve the bandwidth rates as high latency networks are must more sensitive to packet loss than lower latency ones. Many, many papers out there on this topic.