Boeing Ditches Wifi!

This seems to be a retrograde step - Im not sure that the recent situation is going to reduce the number of lap tops? Story Here

Ah well - no in air Skype then?[:#]

[Neil]

No bad thing in my opinion

Neil

Wouldn't it be possible to have some sort of wire connection terminal at each seat?

VS.

Originally posted by VS045
Wouldn't it be possible to have some sort of wire connection terminal at each seat?

VS.

You would have thought so wouldn't you ... after all many have electricity and sound wired in ... but clearly WiFi would be better in the long term, especially as peoples' PDAs, iPods (future) and other devices go WiFi. Wasn't Boeing's story that it just wasn't making money and not that the tech was good?

Originally posted by slinky09

Originally posted by VS045
You would have thought so wouldn't you ... after all many have electricity and sound wired in ... but clearly WiFi would be better in the long term, especially as peoples' PDAs, iPods (future) and other devices go WiFi. Wasn't Boeing's story that it just wasn't making money and not that the tech was good?

The first few aircraft were floodwired with an ethernet jack to every seat on a 747 (that's about 400 seats). However, laptop power wasn't provided in every seat, meaning unless you had a huge battery, you weren't going to use it.

The floodwiring was *very* expensive.

Almost all portable devices have wi-fi, so all later builds were wi-fi only.

Basically, Connexion was a great idea, poorly executed, with a huge business plan, and massive amounts of overstaffing that you would expect from a big company operation like Boeing. At one point, Connexion employed over 700 people. Why did they need so many people?

Those people certainly weren't looking for good business opportunities!

Couple this with an industry that was busy re-trenching following 9/11 and with rising oil prices, that sounded the death knell for it.

I do wonder if Lufthansa, who is the biggest user of Connexion, will try and acquire the assets and defunct service elements from Boeing?

Cheers,
Mike

I don't think the problem for Boeing with Connexions was the technology on the plane, that worked fine (wifi or wired), it was with the cost of being an ISP running a Satelitte based service.

[mcmbenjamin]

And Verizon ditches the AirFone service too.

I will miss my 69 cent calls.

FYI on this subject, news story here regarding Panasonic service.