Can I get a connection? (Part 2)

"I don't know what I'm going to do the next four hours without WiFi" the woman next to me lamented. I nodded in agreement. We'd both spent the past five minutes trying to connect to the Southwest WiFi only to learn it was not offered on this flight. I turned off the WiFi on my computer and resigned myself to the fact that much of the work I'd saved for this flight wasn't going to happen.

This behavior was not atypical of my air travels the past month. On my eight flights the past five weeks, it proved difficult to find and maintain an internet connection. I wish I could say this surprised me but it does not. Airline connectivity remains a tough nut from a technological and economical perspective to crack.

In fact, the purpose of this week's blog is to showcase these challenges and to convince (if I may be so bold) why WiFi will not change in the next 12-24 months for travelers like myself.

In Search of a Connection

Let's start with a single question - why is it so hard to get an internet connection on airplanes? The answer is signal.

Signal is what carries our voices or information from one point to another. On the ground, signal is carried through routers (like the ones that sit in your home) or cell towers (i.e. LTE, 5G-E, 4G, etc.) to reach the internet.

This gets trickier at 35,000 feet because of speed and geography. Since typical commercial planes travel at 400-500 miles per hour, it's hard for signal to maintain a connection with ground based equipment (routers or cell towers). By the time the ground equipment receives the signal request, the plane may already be out of range (and your request will time out). And this becomes a complete non-starter when an airline flies over certain geographies (i.e. bodies of water or outside of the contiguous United States).

Sounds like a tricky issue, right? The good news is that engineers have found two "workable" solutions.

Turning your plane into a "hot spot"

During my travels the past month, I've had to resort to turning my phone into a "hot spot." For the uninitiated, this is a neat trick that allows you to take your cellular connection (typically from your phone) and share it with non-cellular devices (i.e. laptops, non-cellular iPads). In essence you create your own WiFi network to transmit files. This has been an absolute life saver for me when WiFi is not available (see my previous article) or just slow.

That's exactly what airlines have done today - turned the airline into a hotspot. How do they do it? By inserting an antennae on the body of the airplane, the plane connects to multiple ground based equipment at a time ensuring it always has a connection (partially solving that speed issue I mentioned above). In theory, travelers should be able to carry out their normal activities (answer emails, send text messages and make phone calls). For the remainder of this blog, I'll refer to this option as "fixed wireless" or "ground based systems."

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's a Satellite!

You guessed it - satellites are an alternative for airplane connectivity. Similar to fixed wireless/ground based systems, an antennae is placed on the top of the fuselage so that it can connect to satellites orbiting above the Earth. Just like below, the airplane connects to the nearest satellite. One of the biggest advantages of this system is it can provide service while traveling over bodies of water (something fixed wireless cannot do).

Note - See how internet is installed on a Boeing 777.

Fixed Wireless vs. Satellite

Now that you understand how internet can be delivered - let's discuss what airlines use today.

In the past decade, airlines have gravitated towards fixed wireless. The reason was simple - since 2007, telecommunications companies have engaged in a massive build out of connectivity - enabling 3G, 4G and now 5G-E (in select cities) speeds. This means they enhanced existing cell towers or built new ones which airlines could piggy back off of. (Gogo Inflight which provides internet to 1800 airplanes, uses fixed wireless WiFi services).

A drawback for airlines, just like consumers, is roaming. If you've ever traveled internationally and forgotten to buy an international plan or switch your phone to "airplane" mode, chances are you'll end up with a rather large bill. Airlines have the same problem - coverage in the contiguous United States is not an issue, it's when you transverse the borders where it becomes expensive and when WiFi becomes less reliable. Recall that not all countries (including border nations like Mexico or Canada) have built out LTE or 5G-E technologies to the extent that the United States has.

With the upcoming deployment of 5G, you'd think that fixed wireless would be the preferred connectivity method but that's not the case. In recent years, airlines have been switching to satellite based technology. In two separate articles published by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post in July, both indicated that domestic airlines are shifting to satellite systems.

From my perspective, I see two big reasons for this shift. First, the economic model is changing. Previously, airlines used a third party like Gogo Inflight to provide the equipment and the cost of internet. In theory, this sounds like an ideal solution - until you realize that when the WiFi on a flight goes down, the airline becomes reliant on the third party to fix it.

Nowadays, airlines are purchasing the equipment directly and charging consumers directly.

And I suspect they can get better rates on satellite equipment than fixed wireless. There's merit to owning and operating internet internally as WiFi continues to rank as one of the biggest pain points of consumers (going back to my example at the beginning). If WiFi is so important, don't outsource it.

Second, there's been an explosion of interest in satellite technology in the last decade - many from the giants - Amazon, Facebook, and SpaceX. In fact, if my readers have been paying attention, they will recall that SpaceX launched sixty satellites into space in May with the hope of deploying global internet sometime in the future. There's been discussion of setting up a low orbit satellite systems that beam down connectivity. Again, I will caution that this type of connection is still years away - but it does lead me to believe that satellite has a viable future.

It's interesting to see this shift since satellite still offers lower speeds than fixed wireless and is impacted by weather conditions like cloud cover. Satellite television consumers know the pain of having a rain storm disrupt your favorite programming.

Regardless, there's one drawback that neither solution has cracked - streaming. Yes, the service that a majority of Americans use daily - be it Netflix, Amazon Prime Video or YouTube - airlines cannot accommodate the bandwidth capabilities to support streaming video or music at 35,000 feet. That's why you've seen some airlines have creative solutions - American with preloaded movies in their entertainment systems or Southwest with an app full of content ready to watch.

It's this key defect that continues to reinforce to me that WiFi on airlines is still a far off reality for most consumers. When airlines can offer WiFi at a reasonable price (something I did not discuss in this article) or provide the necessary speeds to handle all their needs - they will have cracked the code. Until then, I'll still be searching for that internet connection and only purchasing internet on flights when absolutely essential.