There was a time, not even five years ago, when we were all still expected to pay for Wi-Fi, particularly at hotels and airports. You might get 20 minutes of free service to start, or be asked to pony up your private data via Facebook to get access. Free Wi-Fi was a bonus, a little luxury. That sliver of an era has passed seemingly everywhere but on airplanes. Flights are now often the few hours where you’re still forced to unplug—or pay handsomely for an often terrible signal.
The first explanation that comes to mind for why planes don’t offer free Wi-Fi yet is simple—because it’s a nice stream of income when passengers pay for it. That’s true, but it’s only a small aspect of why the switch hasn’t gone industry-wide yet. JetBlue began offering free Wi-Fi on its flights in 2017, but since then no large American carriers have joined in. Turns out it’s not for lack of trying: Many airlines are in the process of making free, high-speed connectivity possible for all passengers on all planes.
Delta’s CEO Ed Bastian vowed in 2018 that free Wi-Fi was coming soon for their passengers, then re-upped the promise in a 2019 interview and at CES in January 2020. The pandemic may have understandably shifted that priority. “We have come a long way since CES 2020, and while free Wi-Fi won’t happen overnight, our mission to deliver an unparalleled experience for customers has not changed,” said Ekrem Dimbiloglu, Delta’s managing director of brand experience, in a statement on the company’s site that ultimately promised that “most” of their domestic planes would offer free Wi-Fi by the end of 2022.
The rest of the industry is waiting for Delta, says Gary Leff, an aviation expert who’s covered the Wi-Fi race on his site View from the Wing. “Unless Delta takes too long, and United gets their planes retrofitted. But we’re not five years away from this,” he says. “We’re probably going to see it sooner rather than later.”
Why haven’t the airlines made this shift? Simply put, it’s not easy—the process requires a giant investment of time and money as these companies outfit their entire fleets to offer customers the kind of connectivity they’re accustomed to on the ground. “It can cost millions of dollars just to equip one airplane with high-speed internet,” says Ryan Ewing, the founder of the Airline Geeks blog. “It's certainly not cheap. It depends a lot [more] on the actual hardware than it does on just flipping a switch and going, ‘Okay, can we make it free?’”
“Some aircraft can come factory-installed with connectivity so it can enter service ready to go with connectivity,” says a spokesperson for Viasat, the satellite internet company offered on most major American airlines. “Another option for the airline is taking an aircraft out of service for a few days for installation of the in-flight connectivity hardware/system.”
To provide Wi-Fi, planes need to have a satellite antenna, a network modem, and a number of wireless access points around the interior, says Jeff Sare, vice president of in-flight connectivity solutions at Panasonic Avionics Corporation. And all that hardware has to be maintained in addition to installed.
How the internet works remains a mysterious concept even (or especially) to customers who grew up using it, but Sare can break it down: “Though it requires a great deal of technology and engineering to make it all work properly, at its most basic, if you can imagine the airplane as a giant, fast-moving mobile hotspot you have the general idea,” he says. “Inside the plane, your laptop or tablet connects to the wireless access point—or hotspot—via Wi-Fi, which in turn uses the modem and antenna on the top of the plane to send and receive radio signals to and from a satellite.”
Aside from the considerable effort to earmark all that time and money, airlines are under pressure to get that uninterrupted, high-speed connection exactly right across the fleet, lest they annoy customers with high expectations. If anything, forcing people to pay for Wi-Fi can function as a disincentive for most of the plane that allows the paying customers to get better connectivity. In many planes, “the more people who are trying to share bandwidth, the less there is for each person,” says Leff. “When there's not a lot of bandwidth is when they charge a lot because [they’re] trying to ration it. It's sort of ironic that the worse the service is, the more they charge, but it also makes sense.”
Still, that fitting and retrofitting is underway, so as travelers return in greater numbers to the friendly skies in 2022—possibly—they may finally find their Wi-Fi is free. Of course, with that industry switch comes the end of unplugging from work email for a few hours, so now might be the last time to savor the quiet.