GoGo To Launch Slightly Misnomered In-Flight "Talk & Text" Service
GoGo, known for its in-flight Internet connectivity service, is expanding its reach from WiFi access to texts and phone calls. Users will ostensibly be able to send text messages and receive phone calls at 30,000 feet using their own smartphones and an app found in the App Store or Google Play store.
On the one hand, this is huge news for flyers who want to stay in touch with friends, family, or colleagues on the ground; on the other hand, it’s easy to envision a dystopian future where economy class is a wasteland of one-sided conversations filled with detailed descriptions of medical conditions, swoony lovers who can’t bear to be apart for three hours, heated arguments, mind-numbingly banal diatribes on the daily lives of boring people no one else knows, and so on.
However, the “talk” part of the service is not likely to be a common feature. "While we see this as more of a text messaging product for commercial airlines in the United States, the phone functionality is something that some international air carriers and our business aviation customers are asking for," said GoGo CMO Ash ElDifrawi.
Thus, it would seem that texting over WiFi is the premier feature here for the most part, with the ability to actually make phone calls something that’s more of a value-add for certain types of flights and passengers. Hopefully, those flights will have somewhere that passengers can make the occasional call in private.
On the one hand, this is huge news for flyers who want to stay in touch with friends, family, or colleagues on the ground; on the other hand, it’s easy to envision a dystopian future where economy class is a wasteland of one-sided conversations filled with detailed descriptions of medical conditions, swoony lovers who can’t bear to be apart for three hours, heated arguments, mind-numbingly banal diatribes on the daily lives of boring people no one else knows, and so on.
However, the “talk” part of the service is not likely to be a common feature. "While we see this as more of a text messaging product for commercial airlines in the United States, the phone functionality is something that some international air carriers and our business aviation customers are asking for," said GoGo CMO Ash ElDifrawi.
Thus, it would seem that texting over WiFi is the premier feature here for the most part, with the ability to actually make phone calls something that’s more of a value-add for certain types of flights and passengers. Hopefully, those flights will have somewhere that passengers can make the occasional call in private.
