Catbert10

Last three flights with wireless installed, the system couldn't connect to the Internet. The entire flight the connection portal showed "Internet connection not available". It's nice that UA is installing wireless, but it would be better if they could install a service that could actually uplink to the satellite and on to the Internet.

pinguy

What's UA's current charge? Last time it was available, I believe it was around $20.

I flew WN last week. $8 and that includes the whole day even if you're on another flight.

star_world

There's a whole thread about it, with prices for various flights depending on length. $5.99 is the cheapest I've seen it for on my flights.

kevanyalowitz

This happens all the time to me and seems to be something management is either unaware of or does not care about.

To make matters worse, you often don't know until you are in the air that the wifi does not work.

star_world

Why do you assume this? Since the maximum amount of revenue that can be collected from a non-working system is exactly $0, I'm quite sure this is noticed.

I've had this happen on one flight, but had another 10+ where it worked. It's a brand new system (not just for UA, but overall) so I just put it down to that. I sent 1kvoice a note after the flight where it wasn't working, and without asking they sent me a travel cert as compensation.

SkiAdcock

If it doesn't work, do you dispute the charge w/ the CC?

Cheers.

star_world

I had one flight where I wasn't happy with the service - it was very slow. Dropped UA an email, they refunded it the next day. There's also a section on their refunds page for WiFi refunds (http://www.united.com/web/en-US/cont...ds/refund.aspx).

If the service isn't working at all you don't even get the option to pay.

Shouldn't be any need to deal with CC company.

kenn0223

+1, This is extremely frustrating. I am holding pretty constant at about 50% since this summer (14/31). I don't understand the problem and the crews are useless on-board (at least they could push some sort of reset button).

It varies, I've seen $6 for MSP-ORD and $15 for the higher speed option SFO-FRA. I haven't seen $20 for a while (maybe the LAX/SFO-SYD flights - what does SWA charge on that route ).

I think they care more about the number of aircraft with WiFi since they can report that number to the press and shareholders. I think they will worry latter about getting it to actually work.

IME, you never get to the screen where you can enter your credit card information. More importantly, why is your gut reaction to pursue a chargeback?!? Why not just ask UA for a refund, reports so far are that they are pretty good at issuing them? I suspect, like GoGo, they can look up usage and tell pretty easily if you were able to use the service. But again, why bring out the big guns when 5 minutes to fill out a web form would be just as effective and likely faster?

STS-134

Wow. How much did you pay for the wifi, and what was the value of the travel cert?

If the travel cert is only equal to the value what you paid for the wifi, that's pretty bad. UA essentially took your money, didn't provide a service that was promised, is holding it interest-free, and has locked you into using said money on another UA flight, in such a way that you won't be able to use other travel certs or book through anything other than UA.com!

star_world

Travel cert was for around 41x the amount I paid for the WiFi - no complaints from me

edcho

I was talking to the WiFi guy at SMD5's UA event a few weeks ago -- I specifically asked how they did quality control.

He talked about the bandwidth -- Apparently there is a mechanism to control how much bandwidth is being used and will allocate more bandwidth to the plane if necessary. He acknowledged that there is a brief interruption when changing satellites (usually 5-10 minutes) but it shouldn't affect the user experience too much with buffering (so they say).

However, it seemed like he wasn't aware (or acknowledge) any connectivity issues like i've seen (and the OP has seen) where we can't connect through huge chunks of time (or most of the time) while flying within the continental US. I should've grilled him a bit more but the wine (and booze before on the charter) was making me too nice.

It is also interesting to see that (from the diagram that was next to the equipment) that there seems to be a cell backup. I should've taken a pic...

eng3

I sent in a complaint to customer care about poor wifi on a hkg-sfo flight. It was unavailable for about half the flight. When it was available, it was quite slow. Charge was $16.99. They directed me to the refunds form but gave me 2500miles for my trouble.

kenn0223

Interesting, the problems I've had are not with short (5-10min) outages but often the system simply doesn't work (WiFi sticker on the plane, no SSID during flight) or never connects (able to connect to the WiFi but only get the "Service Unavailable" page; despite checking frequently).

I'm not an engineer but it almost seems like the power button isn't turned on (resulting in no SSID) or there is some system issue which prevents the satellite (or back-up cellular) connection from initiating (resulting in the unavailable message for the duration of the flight).

I would assume/hope they do some sort of analysis on the usage and/or revenue from each aircraft with the system installed and when a WiFi equipped 747 does a SFO-SYD run with zero WiFi revenue they dispatch someone to figure out what's wrong.

edcho

I've seen those problems as well -- the system does have an automatic cutoff mechanism when the system is around China and/or below 10,000 feet. Maybe if it doesn't get the altitude info or GPS info, it will automatically cut? It's just an educated guess.

demkr

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11B511 Safari/9537.53)

I got Service Unavailable on two flights. Worked on one. I've actually had terrible luck with having wifi--- only 3 flights this year with it and twice it didn't work.