Nasty shock on landing.

[eastern wiseguy]

Man gets $1,171 bill for using in-flight Wi-Fi in Featured Reads curated by Trove Editors (http://trove.com/me/content/W3YAA?chid=175147&utm_source=editorial&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=srfan)


I notice that EIN are offering a similar service on my ORD-DUB leg this week....must read the small print :p

[Donkey497]

Thank goodness that it's free and pretty rapid on Norwegian...... :-)

[Metro man]

Usually there is a facility where you can be automatically disconnected once you have used up your credit thereby incurring no additional charges. If you tick the box for auto renew it simply keeps on going.

Passengers are advised to disable auto updating of the operating system, virus protection and apps as well to save on excess charges.

[crewmeal]

Can't customers do without it wifi in the air for 6 hours? God help us if we ever have power cuts in the UK. There would be absolute chaos on the streets. Law and order would break down, suicide rates would sore.........

[strake]

Can't customers do without it wifi in the air for 6 hours?
Before the internet and media, of course people could do without it. Now however, most commerce is based on communicating and managing through internet and social technology. That's why airlines, hotels and businesses provide the facility.
So, if your business is based on such a premise, then no you can't do without it. Why should you just because you are in an aeroplane?

[cockney steve]

suicide rates would sore........
only if you rub them up the wrong way :}

[SpringHeeledJack]

I thought this was going to be about a bloke that had both his girlfriends turn up to greet him at the same time after forgetting to lie properly, or failing that, the aircraft had landed at the wrong airport ;)

Apart from bizniz folk with a real need to be 'on-line' all the time (poor sods!), I'm sure that most could work offline on documents or even relax whilst watching a film etc. That this man apparently got stung for a considerable wedge of money is disconcerting, especially as there didn't seem to be a 'back-stop' on the usage/access if it went beyond a fixed and reasonable point. I've not used WiFi at 35,000ft, but have at sea and on a train and both of those experiences were wholly underwhelming in the extreme, slow, slow, slow and overly complicated to get started, the first no doubt because of the satellite link latency and the second because of legalese and bureaucracy at it's finest :hmm:

[Lookleft]

bout a bloke that had both his girlfriends turn up to greet him at the same time after forgetting to lie properly,

I was sitting in the crew room for a regional airline when a F/A from a domestic carrier walked in wanting to know the whereabouts of her pilot boyfriend was. I pointed her in the direction of a recently landed SAAB on the tarmac in which direction she purposefully strode. The only problem was the F/A on the SAAB was also the girlfriend of said pilot....

[nonsense]

Can't customers do without it wifi in the air for 6 hours?
The past, they say, is a foreign country. Which makes us all become foreigners in our own cultures with the passage of time.

I recently read a review of a book entitled "The End of Absence Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (http://www.endofabsence.com/)". The review, presumably by a 20-something, was badly written and not worth quoting, but the premise of the book (http://www.harpercollins.ca/books/End-Absence-Michael-Harris/?isbn=9781443426275) goes like this:

"Only one generation in history (ours) will experience life both with and without the Internet. For everyone who follows us, online life will simply be the air they breathe. Today, we revel in ubiquitous information and constant connection, rarely stopping to consider the implications for our logged-on lives."

Basically he's saying something I have noticed with my own nephews and neice, aged 19 to 29; that the world has changed dramatically and that anyone born after about 1985 has no memory of how things once were. A world without connection is as foreign to them as a world without cars and telephones is to most of us.

My 29yo nephew (born 1985) in many ways lived a childhood closer to my own than to his siblings born in 1995. He was an adult before he bothered to get an email address and is a native of "the land before the internet". I've heard him discuss the attitudes of his younger siblings and the 20-somethings he employs and it is clear he is from our side of the divide, a "digital immigrant". I'm quite sure he doesn't fret about a lack of internet on long flights

Anyone much younger, the digital natives, genuinely feels a bit like they're being asked to walk through horse manure to the post office to post an aerogram written with a quill pen if they're disconnected for a few hours...

The median age (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2177.html) in the USA is about 38 and there aren't many places its much over 40. Within about ten years maximum, the digital natives will outnumber us.

[Metro man]

Absolutely true, the times before and after the Internet will be as significant as the BC/AD divide in categorising a year.

It makes me feel old as I can remember using a record player as a child, soon the CD will go the way of the vinyl disc and it will all be streaming and downloads.

[SpringHeeledJack]

I feel sorry for anyone that 'must' check their electronic life every few minutes. It keeps one in a state of near permanent standby, which is stressful to the whole organism and is very similar to symptoms of pavlovian addiction. The near and middle term future will be interesting in terms of this changeover from the generations that were analogue, so to say, to those that are pure digital. Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic in seeing this transition as not totally positive.

[MG23]

"Only one generation in history (ours) will experience life both with and without the Internet. For everyone who follows us, online life will simply be the air they breathe. Today, we revel in ubiquitous information and constant connection, rarely stopping to consider the implications for our logged-on lives."

Connected, maybe, but only for this brief period of a few decades will the human race experience a life where they can immediately contact anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Once we start living on the Moon, that's about a three second round trip at the speed of light. Already enough to be problematic due to network lag, but not enough to prevent a phone call.

Mars, you can send emails, but you can't make a phone call, or interact meaningfully with a server on Earth. Try to update your status on Facebook, and you'll be waiting twenty minutes or more for it to respond to pressing the 'Post' button.

Alpha Centauri? Nine year round trip for an email and response from Earth. We're done.

We really are living in a unique period in human history, but not for the reasons quoted.

[PAXboy]

SpringHeeledJack
I feel sorry for anyone that 'must' check their electronic life every few minutes. It keeps one in a state of near permanent standby, I'm not sure they see it that way. Their life has that as a default in the same way that our lives have the written page as the default. They don't see it as stressful.

As has been stated, it is only those of us who straddle the change that notice it. Doubtless there were people complaining that "Those idiots want this new fangled 'paper' why can't they wait for the parchment to dry?" Before THAt folks complained about the move to papyrus from clay tablets.

For myself, I have to remain in phone contact for the maximum amount of time. I am self employed and all my work arrives via the wonderful cellular radio phone. I am currently on holiday in South Africa - in the old days, I would have had to phone my answering machine every day to check for messages. Now, my phone rings and I collect the business.

So I don't need the Net but I need my mobile phone switched on the moment the cabin doors open. it isn't stressful, in fact it's deeply easing as I know that my clients can get hold of me.

[ExXB]

... and with time differences I have been known to check my voice-mail messages while inflight (providing the respective airline permits/facilitates it). The ability certain enhances my ability to respond to my customers.

It may not be desirable, but it is the way it works. A 'sorry I didn't get your call, I was inflight' is marginally acceptable. A 'sorry I didn't get your call, I was on holidays (out of town, etc), is not acceptable, not any more.

[Hotel Tango]

A 'sorry I didn't get your call, I was on holidays (out of town, etc), is not acceptable, not any more.

Reminds me how lucky I am to be retired and out of the rat race!

[BOAC]

Nasty shock on landing - just come to this thread - I thought it was another Ryanair 'hard landing' one............................:)

[eastern wiseguy]

BOAC......as a veteran of thirty five plus years as an ATCO you may be certain that that would not be the sort of nonsense that I would devote ANY time to :)

[EEngr]

PROTIP: Turn off auto update. Particularly if you are flying on 'patch Tuesday' with a Microsoft device.

Also, keep in mind that e-mail for a lot of people means some web-based service with all of its attached Flash ads and other cruft. There goes your 30 Mb.
:8