Some airlines offer free wifi, but the ticket prices are usually higher. There's definitely a pretty large cost to offer wifi on an airplane. Most of it these days is satellite based, and there are large antennas on top of the airplane in a dome shaped structure. This increases drag requiring a slight increase in fuel burn. Over time that adds up. The prices here do seem high, considering you only get a small amount of bandwidth. The 80MB option can be blown through just by viewing photos.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago

Yeah but data rate caps are money grab bullshit and everyone knows it.

If they really wanted to measure it per what it costs them it'd be unlimited with speed caps, just that doesn't make nearly as much money

And like any right drag increase(by extension fuel) would be easily lost to favorable or unfavorable winds, the noise is so small considering it is a joke - the extra $0.01 per flight ain't gonna cost them the $50 per passenger they're charging (made up numbers but I'm not gonna whip out drag calculations just yet lmao)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Should be traffic shaping instead of data caps.
One can text at 50kib/s and the other can stream at 2 mbit/s or something like that.