Connexion by Boeing

» see connexionbyboeing.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 2004 I was finishing an engineering degree in Ankara and had not been on a long-haul flight in my life. Connexion happened somewhere above the Atlantic, in the front of a Lufthansa A340, to people whose employers were paying thirty dollars so they could keep working at cruising altitude. That is about as far from a Turkish student's year as a product can get and still be on the same planet.

The engineering is why it belongs here anyway. Boeing announced the service on 13 June 2001 with three American carriers signed up. Lufthansa joined four days later. Then September came, the US airline industry stopped spending on anything that was not survival, and all three American partners walked. Boeing kept building it for three more years with no domestic customer at all.

The first commercial flight was LH452 on 17 May 2004, Munich to Los Angeles. What it required was a phased array antenna on top of the fuselage that stayed pointed at a Ku-band satellite while the aircraft turned underneath it. Behind that sat a ground station network and about half a million dollars of installation per airframe. Passengers got up to 20 Mbit/s down to the aircraft, over Wi-Fi or Ethernet at the seat. In 2004 that was better than most of what people had at home.

It also cost real money. Around ten dollars for an hour, up to $29.95 for unlimited use on a long sector. Nobody had established yet whether being reachable at 11,000 meters was worth paying for, and it turned out that in 2005 most people would rather sleep.

~ the dossier ~

~ who actually flew it ~

The customer list ended up almost entirely non-American. Lufthansa was the anchor and equipped 66 of its 80 long-range aircraft. Japan Airlines and All Nippon flew it, along with Singapore, Korean Air, Asiana, SAS, China Airlines, El Al and Etihad. Boeing had built an American product that only foreign flag carriers were willing to buy.

That is the whole problem in one sentence. The economics needed volume and the volume was in the US domestic fleet, which spent most of this period in bankruptcy court. The American carriers were not going to spend half a million dollars an aircraft on internet in 2004 while they were arguing about whether to keep serving meals.

~ the unraveling ~

By 2006 Boeing was openly shopping the unit and could not find a buyer. On 2 October it made the service free, which is what a company does when it has stopped trying to prove a revenue model and is just running out the clock on its contractual obligations.

The announcement came on 17 August 2006. Boeing's stated reason was that the market for the service had not materialized as expected. The financial version was a charge of roughly 320 million dollars, against a program that had absorbed far more than that over five years. The last day of service was 31 December 2006. Lufthansa switched its aircraft off at the end of the month and the antennas came back off the roofs.

~ the long tail ~

Boeing kept the satellite network alive for government and military customers under a different name, which is generally where an expensive piece of aerospace infrastructure goes when the consumer business underneath it fails.

Within four years of the shutdown, in-flight internet was ordinary. Gogo was selling it over air-to-ground towers across North America, and satellite operators picked up the international routes with hardware that cost a fraction of what Boeing had installed. The idea was correct and the timing was fatal. Connexion needed people who would pay to work on a plane, and it launched into the exact three years when the people most likely to do that were sitting in an industry that could not afford anything.

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