I understand the bandwidth issues have to be solved before WiFi access can broadly expand. However, does that really apply when it comes to opening up messaging for passengers beyond the "hole" that exists on 737s? Seems that would be a good step for UA in the interim.

That would be fine but United has never offered free messaging nor said that free messaging was planned. I would certainly support them doing so, though. Until they do, we're complaining that a service that UAL doesn't offer only works on a portion of the fleet.

What Oscar and Kirby have said is that they think that internet service will be free at some point in the future.

These are the same system, just slightly different generations of hardware. LiveTV (now owned by Thales) provides the aircraft side hardware, and ViaSat operates the satellite. The expanded coverage is due to support for ViaSat-2, instead of just ViaSat-1.

Understood. There's free messaging on certain UA aircraft because UA has unintentionally left the door open. I'm just saying there's no inherent limitation in any of the relevant internet providers' systems that would prevent offering free access if UA were interested in matching the competition.

That's a better way of saying what I meant. Maybe today is not the right time but opening messaging up would make UA's statements on WiFi being free some day more credible. Continuing the status quo without a technical reason discredits the official comments on technology being the reason WiFi isn't free.

My sense is that, to the extent they are even aware of this port leak, they don't want to turn it into an official service, because then it just leads to complaining that it doesn't exist everywhere and why isn't the entire internet free, not just text messaging? And WRT just the text messaging, they don't want to spend the money to allow this leakage on all their systems. They may not even know how the leak is occurring. Regardless, none of this discredits the official comments on technology--specifically available bandwidth in light of what is certain to be enormously increased usage when internet is free--as it's not difficult to understand that the bandwidth required for text messaging is orders of magnitude less than for Web browsing, etc.

That's a non-issue. No one is trying to burn down Atlanta because Delta advertises and provides free messaging but not free internet.

Yeah, I mean bottom line is UA isn't interested in incurring the cost of figuring out how & implementing free texting on all their planes balanced with how they perceive the benefit of "matching their competition" on this particular service, particularly when they are planning eventually free (well, bundled into fares) general internet access. Regardless, none of this bears at all on the plausibility of the claim that they are not offering free internet now because current technology doesn't yet come close to supporting sufficient bandwidth on all their planes, which is not at all controversial and is obviously true.

Thanks for that. I did not know that it was just a progression of the same service.

In any case, in my experience, the ViaSat systems are much more reliable than the older Thales systems in our 737s.

A circumstance for which UA bears sole and exclusive responsibility.

This is of course consistent with UA's overall willingness to offer a patently inferior product, which dates back to Smisek and the notion that "our corporate and/or hub captive flyers have no choice and will fly us regardless."

UA bears zero responsibility for the current state of technology.

Stop for a second and realize we're complaining about not having immediate, high bandwidth, low latency connectivity for hundreds of passengers at a time to any point on the planet, from an aluminum tube hurtling 38,000 feet above the ground at 575 miles per hour.

Yeah - I'm gonna say there just might be a few technical hurdles with this somewhere along the line.

Not so. This thread was started to discuss "messaging" being available, though unsupported, on 737s but not other aircraft. It was not about "having immediate, high bandwidth, low latency connectivity" That's an entirely different thing.

To be fair texting is remarkably low bandwidth. In its original implementation it was essentially "hey here's this overhead in the cellular system that we can't really do anything else useful with, what if we stuff some characters here?" -- but I also don't think it's a critical feature, that UA has any responsibility for providing it, etc. The providers of the ground-to-air/air-to-ground infrastructure have to be paid for their services and the traffic they handle. Other airlines (or perhaps even carriers, e.g. I wouldn't at all be surprised if T-Mobile or whatever is paying a "sponsorship" to whichever airlines does that or to the ATG provider and for whatever reasons UA/UA's providers haven't or can't sought such partnerships.

It is amazing, though, compared to 10-15 years ago how far technology has come -- remember Connexion by Boeing first launched 2001 (commercial launch/demonstration 2003) but then died off by 2006 due to lack of interest. Now we're in an era where we can reasonably expect (for a cost) connectivity over vast swaths of the world... In 2014 I remember posting to Facebook from a BusinessFirst seat somewhere over the vast Pacific between Melbourne and Los Angeles ... not long after proposing to my (now) wife. Prior to COVID airlines were talking about making onboard wifi free to all passengers -- I'm sure the pandemic has pushed things back but "be patient" -- I'm sure aggressive compression will be a big part of the interim solution.

Right, but the piece I was responding to was Kacee's notion that UA is responsible for the fact that free internet isn't available yet due to the inability to support sufficient bandwidth.

Of course. SMS is 140 bytes for a reason - that's exactly the additional amount of space in a GSM paging packet. iMessage or Apple's push notifications and such aren't what I'm getting at. The fact that this can be done /at all/ is amazing. And I've lived my entire career in the telco industry.