![]() Though I can’t know this for sure, it feels like Gary stepping aside and Bob Jordan moving in as CEO has cleared the logjam that will allow Southwest to start doing important things like this that have been on ice for years. Taking a step back here, I find it very interesting that this is happening not long after Gary Kelly stepped down as CEO. And Southwest’s business is a huge chunk of the customer base.Įven though this doesn’t give me everything on my wish list, it is a huge step forward that will make a very big difference for travelers on Southwest. They’ll have to improve or risk losing more of the business. ViaSat works well on a variety of airlines today, but to me what matters here is that this will make Anuvu - the current name of Row 44 turned Global Eagle that provides Southwest’s wifi today - feel the heat of competition. Getting ViaSat on some new deliveries will make a difference as well. If this is truly 10x more bandwidth to each airplane, it will actually become functional. The solution here appears to be to upgrade equipment to get more bandwidth to each airplane… at least, it’ll go to 350 airplanes this year. ![]() Yeah, yeah, it varies depending upon how many people are using the system and all that, but in a day and age where I can fly Spirit and have fast wifi or pay a bit more for full streaming bandwidth, Southwest was far, far behind. Southwest may have been an early adopter of wifi, but its system has been terribly slow on a good day and completely non-functioning on a more normal day. (It’ll actually be done way sooner than that since this is only the MAX fleet.) Presumably Southwest is betting that by the time it finishes the retrofit in 150 years, AC power won’t provide any benefit over USB. It’s obviously perfectly good for phones and even some laptops now, but the world isn’t quite there yet. I assume the idea here is that these new lighter systems that are USB-only will save weight and cost less. The bad news is that this is what’s being installed. The good news is that Southwest has finally reversed course. It stubbornly stuck to this strategy for far too long, even as it began flying long-hauls to Hawai’i with countless devices running out of juice along the way. It was nearly 15 years ago that Southwest announced instead of power, it would roll out… outlets in gate areas. I started searching my archives and I’ve mentioned it many times over the last decade. Onboard power is something that Southwest has needed for AGES. There are two enhancements that matter far more than anything else: wifi and power. Obviously the most important development is the improvement in the moving map, right? The rest is unimportant. It’s a long list, but I think we can all agree that some of these matter a lot and some are pretty irrelevant.
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