Delta To Offer Free WiFi in 1-2 Years
 

Ed Bastian:

"One initiative is rolling out high-speed Wi-Fi on its aircraft. A majority of Delta planes now have it, but it costs $16 a day for North American travel, or $599.99 for an annual pass. “Our goal is to make Wi-Fi free with high-speed quality,” Bastian said. “It will take another year or two to make that happen.”

Source: https://www.barrons.com/articles/del...ew-51552081099

*Sorry if Duplicate Post ... Did a quick search and couldn't find anything*

And thus, another reason to keep the Amex Business Platinum will disappear.

The days of 2Ku being quick are numbered.

Airports and hotels used to routinely charge for wifi, and now they are virtually all free. Makes sense that airplanes would go that way also.

I'm not at all surprised that DL would lead the way on this. I did think that they would start with F/J cabins before rolling out free wifi to all everybody.

I have a hard time considering that DL is the one leading the way on this.

A free tier would no doubt come with usage restrictions to avoid paid user's experience being downgraded too much. Qatar Airways actually does this – they offer an hour of free WiFi with bandwidth restrictions. Albeit my route had much less heavy usage than a Monday morning / Thursday evening commuter route, but the satellite WiFi speeds were perfectly acceptable.

I can easily see them leading U.S. carriers, though as noted above, other carriers already already offer free internet options.

Tmobile customers already get an hour of free wifi so not much of a stretch to think that free wifi will be rolled out to everyone in the next few years. I have considered whether DL would add wifi as a perk for F/J customers, but those customers are also the most likely to pay for wifi, so that probably would not happen (plus doesn't most (if not all) of the revenue go to gogo, which would complicate matters - please don't quote me on that - it is something I have heard, but have no idea if its true).

A number of hotel chains only offer free WiFi when booking directly through them instead of third parties. I could see Delta putting restrictions on this as well. Want free wifi? Just pay to upgrade from Basic Economy to Main Cabin! :D

In the absence of other carriers offering complimentary wifi, this would add a fair bit of value (IMO) to certain cabin experiences if restricted. If flying solo, would I necessarily pay $25-$40 for main cabin instead of basic economy? Maybe not. But in this day and age, I could definitely be talked into it if that offer included wifi.

I assume you mean legacy carriers, right? Jetblue already provides free wireless.

And JetBlue's satellite wifi isn't throttled, nor is it time-limited.

He's talked about this in the past --
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delt...fi-coming.html

T-Mobile's free Wifi is only for use on phones. (Yes, I know people manage to work around that restriction in various ways.)

Opening this up to laptops means that large downloads (or download attempts, anyway). I'm not sure the current infrastructure is really ready for this.

Gogo is a $429M market cap company. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/gogo/

Maybe DL will just buy them.

Just curious, but what does my DLAX BizPlat get me in the way of WiFi? (or my DLAX Reserve). I'm not aware of that benefit.

Gogo has been talking about evolution(s) of 2Ku to add bandwidth even as they started rolling it out a couple of years ago. A quick search now isn't productive for me, regrettably.