Inflight internet isn’t easy to come by on Australian flights, although you can get it when flying internationally out of Australia. But is it worth it?
OnAir: On the plus side
I took the opportunity to test out OnAir’s inflight internet service on a flight from Sydney to Singapore recently (disclaimer: I travelled to Singapore as a guest of LG, for what that’s worth).
There’s an obvious convenience to inflight internet, because the fundamental truth about travelling anywhere from Australia is that it takes an awfully long time. You’re looking at five hours from most destinations just to clear the Australian landmass, unless you’re located in the far north, and you’ve got plenty of time to kill and chewy airplane chicken to digest. A little online frivolity could go a long way.
OnAir’s service operates via Wi-Fi, and requires a credit card signup when you first connect to the service. Beyond that, it’s one of the simplest paid Wi-Fi services I’ve ever used.
OnAir: On the minus side
The issue is, that at least for the flight I was on, it simply wasn’t terribly good.
I can appreciate the technical difficulties of getting Internet access several kilometres up in the sky, so in one sense being able to go online at all is a bit of a miracle. Still, it’s exceptionally slow, and you’ve got to be ready for that. I did try to run a quick speedtest to get a feel for how slow, but it crashed just trying. That’s quite seriously slow, in other words.
Then there’s the issue of the blocks sold. 15MB of data in the modern age really doesn’t go all that far. I was able to quickly check mail, send exactly two tweets and one Facebook status before hitting 14.7MB of total usage, at which point the party was pretty much over. A quick distraction, to be sure, but not one from a quick connection.
Security’s not great, requiring a simple inflight login and password code. The only rule there is that it has to be a minimum of six characters, and you’re broadcasting it over an open Wi-Fi hotspot. If you were seriously looking to do business type work on such a connection, a VPN would be a must — and then you’re going to slow the connection even more.
OnAir: Pricing
It’s not cheap. No, scratch that, it’s seriously expensive for anything but the quickest online check of just about anything. On the flight I took, a scant 15MB of data cost US$14.99, while 30MB of access ran to $28.99. That’s not exactly a bulk discount, now is it?
I will give OnAir credit for allowing a choice between limiting your connection only to what you’ve paid for, or allowing you to continue to surf, at which point it charges US$0.15c per 100KB block. This isn’t friendly for anything but the most immediate checks of email and online sources, and even then you’d need to be awfully quick.
OnAir: Fat Duck Verdict
I’m not the OnAir target customer.
I can’t possibly be, because the prospect of spending that much money for such a tiny amount of Internet connectivity positively scares me. I very much get that the target market is either the incredibly wealthy, who won’t care about the cost because they’re incredibly wealthy, or business types who can charge it to the company, and therefore don’t care about the cost either.
I wonder if they shouldn’t, however. Online access obviously cuts both ways, and while I was able to check a few things while ever so briefly online, it also means that the office can pester you at incredibly expensive but slow data rates. In some ways, having the peace and quiet on board a plane, noisy children notwithstanding, might just be worth more.