New DOT rule mandates proactive refunds for inflight Wi-Fi disruptions

However, air travel ancillaries provided by independent third-party providers not acting as agents or contractors of an airline are exempt from this refund requirement. Panasonic Avionics had sought clarity on this point.

NetForecast's Role

NetForecast has been monitoring passenger experience for inflight Wi-Fi over the past four years and believes it can help airlines establish guidelines for setting a "fair and reasonable" threshold for Wi-Fi service availability. NetForecast measures Quality of Service (QoS) and network performance at the user level, assessing actual passenger experience in-flight.

Rebecca Wetzel, president of NetForecast, explained: “It is important that Wi-Fi service availability be measured from user devices because measurements taken within the network cannot reflect what the passenger is actually experiencing. To help airlines comply with the new rule, we provide airlines with seat-level Wi-Fi availability data by flight so fees can be proactively refunded.”

Even before this rule was implemented, granular data enabled airlines to track dead spots on certain flight paths and anticipate connectivity issues. Now, setting thresholds seems essential for any airline serving the US market and charging for inflight Wi-Fi. This information should be clearly communicated at payment time.

Frequent flyers are familiar with inflight connectivity outages and dead zones, especially on international flights over water. Wetzel noted: “One of the things that we’re finding monitoring thousands of flights is that almost every flight has a period during which there’s a service interruption... We measure the percentage of a flight that has a service interruption and factor that into our QoE in addition to actual latency loss and bandwidth.”

Setting thresholds as percentage figures would mean passengers receive refunds if disconnected for that percentage of time or more — provided this is clearly stipulated upfront. Knowing who’s connected, who’s paid, and who had connection issues would enable prompt refunds even before complaints arise.

It remains uncertain whether this rule will push more carriers towards offering free Wi-Fi models. However, even where Wi-Fi is free, airlines commit to providing a service; failure to deliver could have future implications.