« Previous post
Next post »

January 29, 2008

Continental Takes A Crippled Approach to WiFi in the Sky

Erick Schonfeld

13 comments »

continental.pngConnectivity is fast becoming a competitive necessity in the airline industry. Another airline is adding WiFi service to its flights. This time, Continental. But it is the crippled, low-speed kind that can only handle e-mail and instant messaging. CrunchGear weighs in:

Today Continental announced that they will be offering Wi-Fi, but it will be the same crippled mess that you can find on JetBlue. It’s not all bad, though. The agreement with LiveTV will also bring 36 channels of live TV thanks to DirecTV. First-class passengers will receive the service (TV) for free while economy-class passengers will have to muster up $6. The Wi-Fi service I just mentioned will be free. It’s free because it sucks. I’ll wait for AirCell’s service on American or Virgin America.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Silicon Valley

    January 29th, 2008 at 2:18 pm

    That photograph is stunning. Really Stunning!
    Can you imagine what that would look like as a flash video

  2. Google JET

    January 29th, 2008 at 2:27 pm

    Hey, everybody….

    Look…. It’s Google Jet!!! Does this plane fly to Davos?

    HAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAH!!AHAHAHHAH
    I can’t stop laughing.

  3. Bill Hartzer

    January 29th, 2008 at 2:34 pm

    Hey, at least it’s something…if they can get it to work right (even if it’s slow) then it’s a good baby step to a faster connection.

  4. m.black

    January 29th, 2008 at 3:11 pm

    whoa…

  5. sprezzatura

    January 29th, 2008 at 3:55 pm

    Epic Fail.

  6. Nicolas Schriver

    January 29th, 2008 at 4:11 pm

    That is for sure a great service for the business and first class clientele. If companies are eager to pay so much for its employees fly in business class to be able to work in the plane, not having the wi fi will definitely be a handicap.

  7. Gary Mintchell

    January 29th, 2008 at 4:19 pm

    Have you ridden Continental (or most any other airline)? The seats are so crammed together that getting a laptop out is really tough, unless you’re lucky enough for first class. Maybe with the iPod Touch you could do a little limited surfing. It’s a good marketing ploy, but usage will be limited.

  8. Uh-huh

    January 29th, 2008 at 5:01 pm

    What a crappy TC posting.

    Could you at least have the decency to explain WHY you think the service is such a “crippled mess”? Do you have data rates, latency stats, etc.?

  9. Ujwal

    January 30th, 2008 at 1:10 am

    Just wondering, whats the excuse Airlines are giving for gimping connectivity ?

    why ? is it dangerous ? not tested yet ?

  10. CanCar

    January 30th, 2008 at 5:52 am

    In the airplane we can to advance enough work, the ideal would be that we did more than to receive messages.

  11. rubu

    January 30th, 2008 at 6:20 am

    great service for the business and first class clientele.

  12. Jeff

    January 30th, 2008 at 6:35 am

    Wow techcrunch has great investigative journalism. “It sucks” is very descriptive and tells me a lot about the wifi service.

  13. Felipe

    January 30th, 2008 at 11:30 pm

    Time for tunneling HTTP through e-mail or sth like that :)
    Well, at least tests are free and you’ve plenty of time stuck in your seat to do them …

« Previous post
Next post »