On Inflight Wifi

I was catching up on a past episode of Infinite Loops with Packy McCormick as the guest and he brought up the old Louie CK bit about inflight wifi that boils down to “everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy”.

That’s feeling very real to me right now as I fly SFO > EWR on United with barely functional Panasonic WiFi (quite the contrast to my Starlink equipped flight to SF). This is particularly ironic since back in the day, the SF/LA <> NYC routes were the only planes that had WiFi at all, but now, at least on United, it’s the route with the absolute worst.

Now, because I’m a plane and airline business nerd, I know that that the reason the WiFi is effectively non-functional is because United started retiring it’s 757s but also needed a massive amount of premium seating capacity (due to premium demand) and needed bigger planes (due to slot restrictions at EWR) and so they moved a bunch of internationally configured 767, 777, and 787 planes onto these routes. Unfortunately because they’re meant for international routes, they have the old Panasonic WiFi (since that’s what had the best global coverage at the time they installed it), that has nowhere near enough bandwidth for the 350 people on this plane.

The good news is that United has already started retrofitting the 777 and 787s with Starlink, a process which should speed up over the winter as international flying slows and they can pull more planes out of service temporarily. They’re also rolling out their new A321 “Coastliner” as a dedicated sub-fleet on these routes that will also have Starlink from the jump.

It also highlights the paradox that we’ve never had more powerful portable compute, the fattest of fat clients, and yet, I’m crippled on how much work I can actually achieve over these 5 hours as 95% of what I need to do is dependent upon having at least a reasonably good internet connection for communication, hosted software, research, and accessing hosted models. 

And in my head it pulls up some of those little self judgements that I seem to so regularly do - if I was really enlightened, wouldn’t I be able to just still be productive or happy by writing or doing some other deep work? Why do I need the constant stimulus of information and messages from the internet? Why am I not thrilled to be forcibly out of contact for 5 hours and just use that to relax?

But no, it’s 10:30am on a Wednesday, I don’t want to zone out and watch a movie or 6 episodes of a tv show I’ve already seen. I want to feel productive, I want to feel plugged in, I want to be working on the things I enjoy and that matter in what would otherwise just be empty time as I cross the country.

It is what it is though, so instead I’m going to sit here, writing this in Apple Notes instead of my blog admin, reminding myself of the absurd privilege we have, able to cross 3,000 miles of mountains, plains, rivers, and more in only a few hours, in relative comfort, and almost complete safety. Can you even fathom what our forefathers would have given for that?