March 20th, 2009
Live from 40,000+ feet: Southwest Airlines WiFi
Now, there’s no excuse for your work to be late
My flight tonight is a special wi-fi equipped Southwest Airlines jet with free wi-fi on-board. This post is hitting the ZDNet mother server via this aircraft as we cross over Colorado.
How’s it working? Pretty good!
To be honest, my expectations weren’t very high. I remember earlier air-borne technologies that never performed well and cost a fortune. Anyone ever do a phone call on one of those in-flight phones? I did once and quit. I couldn’t hear anything and I had to almost scream to be heard.
For SWA’s wi-fi, I’ve already checked email and surfed the web. I’ll be hitting the send button on this post in a minute. Hey, even the ads ZDNet places on my blog are loaded and their animation is working! Not bad….
Well, I’ve got some client work to finish. My review of this technology:
- It’s not blazing fast but definitely a viable answer to sending and receiving email.
- I’m not sure you’ll want to watch streaming video over this or fire off a 10 mb email attachment
- Would I use again? Absolutely.
*************** UPDATE *********************
The service works so well, I’m even getting most critical emails. In the last few minutes, I’ve apparently won a foreign lottery and might collect millions from someone’s estate in Nigeria. Wow!
Sadly, I also got a few work emails, too.
I can think of two things SWA could do to make the experience even more complete:
- don’t let seat backs recline. I can’t surf the net when someone’s cranked their seat back and the only view I have is of their dandruff and not my laptop screen.
- put those power sockets under the seats like American Airlines does
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***************** Additional Update ******************
After reading the comments to this post, I decided to add the following:
- Yes, I knew I was on a wifi flight. SWA sent me an email two days before departure advising me of this capability. I agree that when an airline promises a particular aircraft, it may not deliver it due to some mechanical or scheduling issue. But, this a brand-new service from SWA and I’m fairly sure that they wouldn’t have promoted the service if they weren’t pretty sure that they could deliver that aircraft the next day.
- Yes, a netbook is far preferable to a notebook on an airline. No argument there. Although I do enjoy the occasional DVD I can watch on my laptop on transcontinental flights. Many netbooks have no DVD player. Netbook or notebook, the real issue is the lack of personal space on airplanes. I don’t want to watch video on IPods or netbooks. I’d like to stretch out and not be intruding on someone else’s space (or vice versa).
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This blog explores the intersection set between services and technology. If it impacts either space, it will be covered here. Brian Sommer is a former Accenture partner. He did an 18-year tour of duty there and ran three small practice units (Finance Center of Excellence, HR Center of Excellence and Software Intelligence). He’s sold service projects in almost every continent and remains just as current on both services and technology today as ever before. Brian is currently CEO of TechVentive, a strategy consultancy servicing technology providers, and a research analyst with Vital Analysis. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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