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> it does not require a lot of extra investment to support ships and aircrafts. Are you sure about that? I have a friend who worked in airspace comms his whole
by throwaway894345 4y ago
> it does not require a lot of extra investment to support ships and aircrafts.
Are you sure about that? I have a friend who worked in airspace comms his whole career (including at Gogo) and he described some of the challenges of the engineering problem (these systems have to be airgapped from the critical systems on the plane, the certification processes, the antennas have to be super highly directional to talk with satelites high overhead while both the plane and the satellite are moving at tremendous speed, etc). Maybe your "not a lot of extra investment" is relative, but it seems like there's still a bunch of work to make these things work on planes.
- mytailorisrich 4y agoYes, of course it is relative. Developing new terminals is orders or magnitude cheaper than developing and deploying a cellular network.
- lxgr 4y agoTrue, but complex terminals increase the unit price and ongoing cost (higher weight and surface area both increase fuel consumption). EAN supposedly works with only 300 base stations – in terms of terrestrial networks, that‘s nothing.
- throwaway894345 4y agoThat's fine, I wasn't sure if you were making a relative point or if you were implying that equipping planes was trivial in some absolute sense.