Increasingly, it is that last question that matters most.
Hotels, airports and airlines are struggling to keep up with customers streaming movies on their tablets and hosting online meetings on their laptops, with varying degrees of success. While hoteliers and airport authorities have been fighting the bandwidth battle for years, airlines are still installing Wi-Fi on many aircraft and are already confronting challenges.
Travelers who want Wi-Fi in the air cannot always tell if a plane will have Internet service when they book their tickets. Prices for service are still evolving, and the quality of the connection does not come close to matching what most people are used to on the ground.
“No matter what the system is, none of them right now are showing the ability to keep up with passenger demand,” said Mary Kirby, editor in chief of Airline Passenger Experience magazine. “I’ve heard complaints about every single system.”
Acknowledging the technical hurdles involved in delivering Internet service to a plane traveling 500 miles an hour, Ms. Kirby said airlines and their connectivity partners needed to better manage passenger expectations.
“It’s time for the industry to say, ‘Here’s reasonably what you can expect, and it’s not an at-home experience,’ ” she said. “A passenger should expect to be able to use social media and check e-mail. But you’re not going to be able to send e-mails with really big files, and you’re not going to be able to stream video.”
A new Web site, Routehappy.com, is helping travelers find out if a flight has Wi-Fi — information many airlines do not reveal until after a ticket is booked. Routehappy lets travelers search for flights on a particular route, like New York to San Francisco, then sort the results based on various “happiness factors,” including whether the flight offers Wi-Fi.
For a weekday in mid-April, Routehappy calculated that 24 percent of domestic flights offered Wi-Fi, 56 percent did not and 20 percent might. John Walton, Routehappy’s director of data, says the “maybe” category reflects the fact that airlines are busy installing this technology, so it is not always possible to determine weeks in advance if a flight will have it or how well it will work.
“You never know how many other people are going to be using Wi-Fi at the same time,” Mr. Walton said.
Airlines and Wi-Fi providers say typical demand is 5 to 10 percent of passengers, but use is often higher on longer flights. On Virgin America, which offers Wi-Fi on all its planes, 20 percent of passengers typically log on, said Abby Lunardini, a company spokeswoman, and more than a third use Wi-Fi on transcontinental routes.
Most carriers use an air-to-ground system provided by Gogo, which relies on a network of ground-based cellular towers to communicate with aircraft flying across the United States. Gogo’s system can deliver Internet speeds of 3.1 to 9.8 megabits per second, usually much slower than a typical home connection.
Looking to address these speed limitations, Gogo and other Wi-Fi providers are moving toward satellite-based systems capable of delivering faster Internet service. Satellite systems also work over the ocean, enabling carriers to offer Wi-Fi on international flights.
American Airlines has international Wi-Fi on its Boeing 777-300ER aircraft, which fly between Dallas or New York and London, and between New York and São Paulo, Brazil. United Airlines also offers Wi-Fi service on some international flights but does not specify which routes.
Delta is considered a leader on the Wi-Fi front in the United States, providing Internet service on more than 800 aircraft, including many regional jets. American has about 450 Wi-Fi-equipped planes, Southwest Airlines more than 400 and United 50. JetBlue plans to introduce a satellite-based Internet service this year, promising faster speeds than its competitors offer — and at least basic Wi-Fi free.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/business/travelers-increasingly-demand-high-quality-wi-fi.html?partner=rss&emc=rss