Iberia’s WiFi experience: not to be repeated except in an emergency
Yesterday I had my first opportunity to try using an internet connection on a flight by the Spanish flag carrier Iberia between New York and Madrid. This couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment: I had to write up the conclusions to my IE Brown Executive MBA class that I had been delivering in the Big Apple, over the course of which my students and I had discussed Facebook’s strategy in light of the company’s recent acquisitions of What’sApp and Oculus VR, and which I had not been able to finish at the airport.
To begin with, the only change I could see once I had settled into my seat was that the now obsolete no smoking warning light had been swapped for one saying that it was prohibited to use a cellphone, which goes off when use is authorized.
Connectivity is provided by OnAir, and is only available on Iberia flights using the company’s Airbus 330 and A340 planes. This means opening an account with a credit card for either 22MBs at a cost of $19.95, or 50 MBs for $29.95, with any use thereafter charged at $0.171 for every 100 KBs used.
In short, the experience was a disaster. I had delivered my class using using Blackboard, one of the few positive things that can be said of which is that it uses relatively little bandwidth. But I soon encountered a number of absurd restrictions: it was not possible to enter the WordPress console of my blog, nor was it possible to access Google hangouts, and I’m not talking about video here, which the cost of using would have required remortgaging my home, but simply accessing text messages. In general, navigation was slow and constantly being interrupted, which one might be inclined to accept, given the limitations of the service, but when combined with constantly having to check with the counter to see how much bandwidth I was consuming, made the whole experience unbearable.
All of the ways that we have now become used to navigating: leaving our Gmail, Twitter, or feed readers open on auto-refresh, are not possible unless you want to see your 20 bucks disappear in the blink of an eye. This means closing all windows, email included, and only having open those you actually need at that moment. The upshot is that one is only likely to use Iberia’s WiFi service in an emergency.
Is it really necessary to deliver this service in such a disagreeable manner? Are we talking about something here that is so expensive it needs to be priced in terms of cavier, and plagued with limitations? Just how much does it cost to move data by satellite, and what is the profit margin here for the suppliers of this service?
Quite simply, there is no point in providing a luxury product that offers such a poor experience. One thing is to restrict the amount of time one can use such a service, as long as during that time, there is no limit on the amount of bandwidth one consumes Lufthansa, for example, uses FlyNet, which offers two hours connection for 11 euros, or 24 hours for 20 euros, and makes a whole lot more sense than the approach Iberia has taken.
When an airline is considering offering a service like internet connection, which many passengers are going to want to use, the first thing is to think about what those passengers are going to need. Making it very expensive might make sense depending on the market the airline thinks there is for the service. But Iberia’s service is not only expensive, it seems designed for users from the last century, requiring them to keep count on how many bits they are using to perform a specific task.
But the thing is that most of us have largely forgotten about having to count how bits we are using. In short, in a world where pages update automatically, and where we have several pages open at the same time, and as often as not simply use the web to amuse ourselves for a few hours, a service like Iberia’s makes no sense at all, and needs to be thought through again.
Iberia really does seem to have gotten this wrong. I would imagine that a large number of passengers would be prepared to pay a little bit more for their ticket on a long-distance flight so as to be connected while airborne. As things stand, I would only bother to use this service again in an emergency. In other words, Iberia has failed to adapt to the times and the needs of its customers.
(En español, aquí)