15
Oct
I was sitting at the gate in Sky Harbor, the Phoenix airport (Great name, f*cking embarassingly bad food.), when I saw our plane getting suited up for the flight. Having commented weeks ago about the amount of JetBlue branding on the jets, I took this photo. The huge Yahoo! logo and smaller BlackBerry logo made me laugh, as usual. But when I boarded the plane, it all made sense: I was on a BetaBlue aircraft. This is JetBlue’s test project for providing wi-fi on flights. Yes, Internet access on the plane. Sounds great, right?
Well, it’s not exactly what it seems. You really have to read the not-so-fine print. “Email/IM/Shopping Onboard.” It isn’t really Internet access, and the finer print tells you “…does not provide for Internet surfing….” It’s hard to say what the reasoning is, but clearly they’re keeping a pretty tight hold on bandwidth and browsing. It could be for that reason—they have no idea what will happen with bandwidth, with users and how they’ll browse. Which makes sense—no illegal downloading, no pjorn (or course), no questionable content. You have to go through their own custom page to link through to either your email client, or Amazon for shopping.
It’s a great starting point. Business people can check their mail on the plane, which is certainly the most important point of use, except for family or friends who have to monitor some other timely, crucial situation (though you know it’s more about obsessively checking email). Folks who have nothing better to do but shop can do that, too.
The only issue I had, other than my inability to browse, was that the two times I tried to log on, there was no service. As the brochure says, “…users may lose connectivity from time to time due to network coverage limitations.” That was certainly true. It seems like a lot of marketing and branding for a limited, awkward service. Here’s to the near future when we can all log on and do what we need to in the cloud, from the clouds.
