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GoGo Quietly Raises In-Flight Broadband Prices
'Experimenting' With Pricing on Certain Flights, Says Company
Aicell's GoGo has quietly hiked the price of their in-flight broadband service. Several flyers have noticed that GoGo has effectively tripled their prices, eliminating the company's $17.95 per flight charge in exchange for either a $30 monthly pass or $10 per hour of use. GoGo's website still shows a $12.70 24 hour option if you buy before you fly, but many in-flight customers on popular flights appear to no longer be getting that option. The company tells Venturebeat that they're just "experimenting with pricing." The price hike is an interesting choice for a company that has struggled with adoption among consumer expectations of free Wi-Fi. A study this week highlighted that most flyers still don't want to pay more than $5 for service.
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battleop
join:2005-09-28
00000

battleop

Member

Too much...

I am not going to pay $17.95 for a service that has horrible latency, high packet loss, and speed that vary form dialup to dsl at best. Over the last two years I think it's gone from $6-7 per flight to $11-12ish to flight. I can expense this on my company card so I am not paying for it but I flat out refuse to pay $18 for about an hour of internet even it it's not my money.
ISurfTooMuch
join:2007-04-23
Tuscaloosa, AL

ISurfTooMuch

Member

Re: Too much...

Agreed. I wouldn't spend my money or my employer's money on this. I just don't see the value in it. Normally, when I'm on a plane, I try to take a nap to relieve the stress of the whole experience, so I have no use for it for personal entertainment. As for work, I guess I'm not important enough that I'm sent e-mails that must be addressed that very moment. And really, any company that puts that kind of pressure on someone isn't very well organized, IMHO, since there should always be a backup person to make decisions in case the primary person is unavailable.
rradina
join:2000-08-08
Chesterfield, MO

rradina

Member

Re: Too much...

It's not always the company. The company might not care but sometimes certain employees believe they are that important (typically micro managers). They inject themselves into processes and if they don't respond quickly, things can come to a halt. Generally it's inexperienced managers who were good at their previous level but have trouble transitioning to an understanding of their new role and value. Their new value isn't total control of their former tasks. It's organizing, supporting, delegating and leading others who to do those tasks. If they do the latter, being out of touch for a few hours isn't going to halt productivity.
ISurfTooMuch
join:2007-04-23
Tuscaloosa, AL

ISurfTooMuch

Member

Re: Too much...

I used to work for a woman who made sure that everyone in her department was trained in everyone else's job, so, if one person was away, someone else could step in and do what needed to be done. And while she did make managerial decisions, she said that she would always support our decisions as long as we had thought them through and could explain our reasoning. And, although she would check her e-mail and voicemail regularly, she never got obsessed with it. If she was out of town, she'd check in every day or two, but we always knew that, if something really needed her attention, we could call her. We rarely had to, since we knew she wasn't going to second-guess the decisions we made in her absence.

Now that's the kind of person you want to work for. Of course, it helped that we'd go drinking on business trips. Not heavily, mind you, but there was one time when we were in Atlanta and ended up in this upscale bar drinking key lime martinis. When we got back from that trip, she went on a mission to get the recipe, going so far as to call the bar to find out where they ordered their ingredients. Then she bought everything, brought it to work, and we proceeded to lock up our office one Friday afternoon and have a martini drinking party in the back. I make lots more money now than I did then, but those were some fun times!
rradina
join:2000-08-08
Chesterfield, MO

rradina

Member

Re: Too much...

We are way OT but at my second post-college job a business trip to NYC ended at a Little Italy restaurant. After dinner and several carafes of the house Chardonnay, the women were ripped and I, young, naive and a newlywed, was filled to the brim with gossip. One of them was my boss and she mentioned an after-hours incident with her significant other when the cleaning crew walked in on them. Then the women started comparing male specifications and my boss made everyone at the table sign a Vegas napkin. Several years later she pulled it out of her desk and we all had a good laugh. That was over 20 years ago.

Sadly, it's been a while since the corporate environment has been that much fun. The PC police have ruined a lot of fun -- which I guess isn't fun for everyone. It also seems that today men are extremely cautious and would never be that loose with female subordinates.
elefante72
join:2010-12-03
East Amherst, NY

elefante72 to battleop

Member

to battleop
They have to raise the price, because quite frankly they are heavily bandwidth constrained. So if more than 10-15 people are on forget about any semblance of reasonable usage.

Sooner of later they will probably have tiered offerings but they need to balance the link w/ revenue and will need to find out some way to keep streaming off. So maybe $5 to access (phone or tab only) facebook, mail, web -- ie low bandwidth asynchronous apps-- etc. I believe that would hook the regular people.

At $5 you will get the "regular" people, and that will kill the link.

This is like the airphone, nothing more.

Thaler
Premium Member
join:2004-02-02
Los Angeles, CA

Thaler to battleop

Premium Member

to battleop
They were already struggling to get people to swallow their ~$10/flight service. What makes them think tripling the costs will help this situation at all? Might as well jack up the rates to $100 (or 10x the cost) to connect, and bank entirely on the one sap who *has* to have internet access for their flight?
kaila
join:2000-10-11
Lincolnshire, IL

kaila

Member

GoGo making it even harder to justify in-flight access....

Do they want this to fail? $10hr will probably catch a few impulse or desperation buys, but discourage everyone else. And unless things have improved significantly, the service itself is very weak and unable to support much beyond simple email and static web content.
tpkatl
join:2009-11-16
Dacula, GA

tpkatl

Member

Perhaps one of the dumbest moves ever

Interesting that this came out today. I read one news article that said that one of the airplane wifi companies was about to lower rates, and then GoGo raises theirs. GoGo's approach seems stupid to me.

They want to increase usage and business. It seems like the way to accomplish that is to lower prices and get people hooked on usage; not to triple the cost (depending on length of time in the air).

I've used gogo twice in different flights - it took a good 15 minutes to achieve a solid connection. Now they want to charge me for their inadequacies?

Never again.
iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Austin, TX

iansltx

Member

Re: Perhaps one of the dumbest moves ever

No. They want you off their system, replaced by someone who will pay $10/hr for service

Seriously though, Gogo has very limited capacity: a single EvDO Rev. A channel to serve one or more aircraft. So they have to price their service in such a way that they can still make money on that kind of backhaul.

MrMaster
Rum Connoisseur
Premium Member
join:2000-12-16
St Thomas, VI

MrMaster

Premium Member

no price change on my flights

It was the normal rates for me this past sunday. I also don't know what a "popular" flight even means?

morbo
Complete Your Transaction
join:2002-01-22
00000

morbo

Member

travelers cannot plan ahead for this service

The problem with wifi on planes is that it is not on every plane. I cannot plan to have service on a flight because it is not advertised when I make my flight arrangements. Until it is more widespread, adoption is going to be limited.
iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Austin, TX

iansltx

Member

Re: travelers cannot plan ahead for this service

Au contraire; Delta has WiFi on all of its domestic mainline jets and the majority of its 70+ seat regional jets at this point. Virgin America has it on all their fleet. AirTran has it on all theirs. Frontier has it on all of their E190s.

American and Southwest on the other hand are spotty. But Southwest makes up for this by charging $5 per day per device. I used the service on both of my recent flights on the airline, and actually got some work done over the connection. Then again, the service traded latency for speed; page loads were quite a bit slower than what I've seen on Gogo, with the exception of sites that appeared to be hosted on the aircraft or close to it.
travelguy
join:1999-09-03
Bismarck, ND
Asus RT-AC68
Ubiquiti NSM5

1 edit

travelguy

Member

Re: travelers cannot plan ahead for this service

Just as a minor point of clarification - Row 44 (Southwest) uses Ku band satcom links which aren't nearly as constrained as GoGo, which uses a ground based system similar to cellular. As you mentioned, the latency on Row 44 can be a problem. I wasn't real impressed with the speeds even though Row44 technically should be able to support up to 11Mbps.
iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Austin, TX

iansltx

Member

Re: travelers cannot plan ahead for this service

Good point of clarification, though if you're using Satcom as a brand name that's incorrect; they're bouncing off of HughesNet birds. I think the service can have as much as 45 Mbps of capacity, though I'm unsure of how many planes that capacity is spread over.

morbo
Complete Your Transaction
join:2002-01-22
00000

morbo to iansltx

Member

to iansltx
said by iansltx:

Au contraire; Delta has WiFi on all of its domestic mainline jets and the majority of its 70+ seat regional jets at this point.

Good to know!
tcope
Premium Member
join:2003-05-07
Sandy, UT

tcope

Premium Member

Set up to fail

As mentioned... the service they provide is _HORRIBLE_. It was not worth what they were charging before... let alone a higher fee. GoGo is setting themselves up to be a house of cards. They will get those first time users who don't know any better but won't have any repeat customers to sustain their business. I suspect once they see their revenue declining that they will take correct actions but by then it will be too late. They will have soured their bread and butter customers.

MSauk
MSauk
Premium Member
join:2002-01-17
Sandy, UT

MSauk

Premium Member

Never had an issue, but 10 dollars an hour!

I have flown often the past few years and I never had an issue with their service. Is it slow, well yeah. But it works well enough to browse while I am flying for many hours.

To hear that they are doing this though, would completely stop me from using their service. At their current prices it was worth it to me to purchase it, but 10 dollars an hour? Yeah I do not think so.
nickphx
join:2009-10-29
Phoenix, AZ

nickphx

Member

works for me, i'd pay more too!

The only time I've had a problem with the service is when some asshat decides to stream youtube videos. I think the higher price point will remove the abusive plebeians and allow people that actually use the internet for work to get work done.

WHT
join:2010-03-26
Rosston, TX

WHT

Member

Re: works for me, i'd pay more too!

said by nickphx:

abusive plebeians

Well put. I may use that phrase in the future.

ReVeLaTeD
Premium Member
join:2001-11-10
San Diego, CA

ReVeLaTeD

Premium Member

Well

I have used the $18/flight service before. it's convenient. But I think the $10/hour is a better deal for smart people.

Why?

Most don't need internet but a few minutes to check email and maybe do some web browsing at best. The rest of the time they're reading books or magazines or sleeping. The thing is, there just isn't anything to be doing for that time except work, and the plane is one occasion I don't fancy doing work. So I do my best to avoid it and do personal stuff instead; like write some more pages of my book. Since that is synchronized down to my computer, I don't need internet except to sync it back up when I get to the hotel.

So for me, it'll end up saving me $8 since I don't ever use the access the full time anyway.

People who (as noted above) just stream a bunch of YouTube videos or whatnot are the issue, and they will learn a hard lesson.

I would do the monthly but I don't fly nearly enough to justify it.