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Old Dec 1, 2018, 1:08 pm
  #9  
drajknox
 
Join Date: Dec 2015
Posts: 365
Originally Posted by sbiddle
It seems a very interesting decision to make. Ignoring the cost aspect, the fact is there are plenty of technical reasons why it's not necessarily a great idea. I hope for their sake it doesn't result in a similar situation as Koru with the service imploding and ending up pretty much unusable due to high uptake.
It was interesting on NZ29 overnight - while it worked it was quite fast and really good - however multiple resets and a prolonged period when despite WiFi connectivity no internet connection - on other occasions internet showed as connected on plane console yet no internet although as I say overall the service was good. The FSM told me that there were 64 customers connected at one point which seemed high taking into account that at that point most wouldn’t have expected it to be free. There was no inflight announcement that it would be free. The customer facing page still asks you to switch to another device using a code but since there is no payment I wouldn’t be surprised if many customers don’t create several connections using different email addresses which would potentially add significant demand to bandwidth and I suggested this morning to the FSM that one should have to at least login with an Airpoints account number - he said he would suggest this in his Flight report. I made the same point that you did Steve that it might be unusable if too much competition for bandwidth especially if some customers had multiple devices connected at once and this could significantly affect customers being willing to pay for WiFi at a later time if the customer experience was awful.
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