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October 24, 2006
They're off their nut
The ferry run between Seattle and Bainbridge has had WiFi over Water for a while now - funded by grant money. We've always known they were going to convert it to a paid system "someday," and someday arrives at the end of November.
They've finally (it arrived in my inbox a couple hours ago) released pricing. And my initial reaction is "they must be mad."
They're offering three tiers of service:
$30/month, $7/day, or $3 for 15 minutes + $.25 for each addition 15 minutes.
The Seattle/Bainbridge run is 35 minutes - so assuming you aren't waiting across ferries (regular commuters typically don't, save for horrific traffic or other unforeseen circumstance) that means just over an hour a day, 20 days a work month for $30, or $1.50/hour.
Compare that to 768k DSL - which Verizon is offering for $15/month (for 24x7 dedicated access) and it starts to look pretty unreasonable - especially given that you're sharing that link with several hundred other commuters.
To do a fair comparison, we'd need to know how much bandwidth you get through the on-ship WiFi, but they aren't saying - only that it'll be "faster" than it currently is (which wouldn't be hard - on a busy day, my Treo acting as a Bluetooth modem can give the on-ship WiFi a run for it's money).
In any event - I imagine they'll have plenty of customers - folks who can get their employer to pay for it, or who think that they can't possibly live off-line for those 30 minutes.
And of course, they've trained us all to expect connectivity while en-route. Like any good dealer, the first one was free...
Posted by dberger at October 24, 2006 5:42 PM