Goodbye to Verizon JetConnect
Apr 29th, 2005 | By Jared BlankA little story as background: A couple of years ago when Verizon launched JetConnect, their inflight email and instant messenger service, I was still with Jupiter Research and I wrote a note to our clients saying, in a slightly snarky way, that I thought consumers will stay the hell away from this because, after all, shouldn’t people have some peace and quiet when they’re traveling on business? Do they really need to send email during a 2 hour flight?
Well, it turns out I was half correct. JetConnect is going away, but not because people don’t want to send email in-flight. As anyone who has flown has noticed, people will Blackberry happily for 4 hours…they just didn’t want to pay a rather reasonable $5.95 for a slow e-mail connection. Verizon will now focus on putting wi-fi in planes. Nice.