Andrew Sarangan wrote:

On Oct 25, 11:06 pm, James Robinson wrote:
Andrew Sarangan wrote:
Most of the times I am writing proposals or evaluating other
peoples proposals, so I don't know ahead of time what resources I
might need. I may need to pull an article from a journal, or search
for a piece of information on a government database. Besides, I
don't like the idea of syncing everything that is on my server to a
laptop because of the security risk. On an aircraft that costs
hundreds of millions, surely there must be a way to link to the
internet via some satellite link. If Southwest offered internet
access, I would happily take their bench seats over private suites
in a luxury airline that did not offer data service.

Singapore Airlines used to have the Boeing Connexion service for
broadband internet. Fees were something like $30 for unlimited
access on the flight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connexion_by_Boeing

As noted in the above link, Boeing decided to shut down the
commercial service about a year ago, since they couldn't attract
enough customers.


This defies my logic. If $30 for unlimited broadband was a hard sell,
how is $15/min for a bed on an airplane an easy sell?

Perhaps the people who can pay the big bucks for private suites are the
type who wouldn't soil their hands on a computer?

If you read the article in the link, they said that while the service was
popular in Europe, they couldn't get enough customers in the US. So it's
Joe Sixpack who wouldn't cough up the money.