WiFi Prices keep going up
Nov 9, 2018, 8:39 am
#31
Join Date: Jan 2016
Posts: 622
I wish UA would offer different levels of service. I'm not entirely interested in paying $45 for the full flight when all I want to do is send some messages via my phone. I'd gladly pay $5-10 for that level of service, and use a heck of a lot less bandwidth than other users.
If I had to guess -- and it's just that, a guess -- UA was encountering an increasing number of flights where utilization of the service was exceeding the aircraft's max bandwidth capacity. If I'm syncing my laptop's outlook after a day off the grid somewhere, I can easily pull down a gig of new data, as a single user, in my first connected hour. And that's without trying to stream audio or video content. Now that's obviously a heavy use case, but a 777-200 could easily have 30 heavy business users in J alone, to say nothing of others in the back.
Nov 9, 2018, 9:58 am
#32
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: May 2007
Location: Houston
Programs: UA Plat, Marriott Gold
Posts: 12,693
The easy answer to both of the above is to switch to a data-metered rate instead of a time-metered rate. On a time-metered plan, users have an incentive to cram as much down the pipe as quickly as possible, but not so with a data metered plan. I'd also prefer to spend $10 for 10 MB instead of $40 for 6 hours (price on my last PS flight), since most of what I browse (like FT) is text heavy and data-light.
Also since the airline passenger stuff is such low priority, the volume used isn't so critical since any unused capacity is lost anyway.
Nov 9, 2018, 12:46 pm
#33
Original Poster
Join Date: Mar 2007
Programs: Mileage Plus
Posts: 15
Epilog: there were problems with the service on UA919 yesterday so much so that it was basically unusable. I could occasionally get a connection but most of the journey was connectionless. I requested a refund this morning.