While enormous advancements in airport and airline technology dominated travel industry news in 2015, one area in particular seemed to make headlines more often than the rest of the pack. From lawsuits to relentlessly expanding access, this was the year in Wi-Fi.
Photo: MA1216, Flickr
Marriott blocks personal hotspots, and pays the price. Marriott spent the early months of 2015 embroiled in a scandal surrounding the company’s decision to jam personal Wi-Fi hotspots during a Nashville conference in 2014 in an effort to force attendees into ponying up between $250 and $1,000 to connect to the Marriott-provided internet option. The company was eventually fined $600,000, but not before it got tangled up in a second negative press cycle for petitioning the FCC for the right to block guests’ personal wireless hotspots.
The entire hotel industry tuned in to the lengthy legal and press fallout, perhaps leading to our next big Wi-Fi breakthrough of the year.
Grand Hyatt San Francisco (Photo: Hyatt.com)
Free Wi-Fi comes to hotels. Following the Marriott scandal, Hyatt became the first major American hotel chain to read the tea leaves of tomorrow and just get on with offering free Wi-Fi at all of its properties already. Much of the rest of the industry spent 2015 falling in line, and consumers now enjoy complimentary Wi-Fi in some form or another more often than not at hotels nationwide. My what a difference a year makes.
Photo: JetBlue
Airlines begin piecing together their own free internet options: The hotel industry had it easy by comparison. Landlocked properties that could be serviced with individual routers in each room? Bah! The airlines could only dream of such luxuries! Still, airline after airline made news in 2015 for innovative offerings for surfing the web while soaring through the sky.
Virgin America partnered with Netflix to provide free Wi-Fi and the content company’s entire streaming catalogue aboard Virgin flights for several months. JetBlue went a step further, announcing plans to become the first U.S. carrier to provide free, hi-speed wireless internet on all of its flights, and partnered with Netflix rival Amazon for in-air content streaming options. With the country’s plucky upstart airlines proving free Wi-Fi is possible, it’s only a matter of time (or so we hope) before the larger carriers implement their own free internet offerings.
Screenshot: MIT
Could Wi-Fi be used in airport security? The superbrains over at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab spent 2015 devising a way of using Wi-Fi to identify the unique characteristics of individual humans, even through walls. Refracted waves are pieced together using an algorithm that reconstructs an image of each person, down to the specific details that make us each unique. The technology could one day replace the millimeter wave scanners that TSA currently uses in airport security.
Photo: Henrique Pinto, Flickr
Wi-Fi’s more powerful sister tech Li-Fi joins the party. With innumerable gadgets now tuned in to the relatively thin spectrum of radio frequency that Wi-Fi operates within, it was only a matter of time before our wireless addiction led to the colonization of additional spectrums. Enter Li-Fi, the wireless internet built upon the 10,000-times-larger-than-radio visible light spectrum.
Estonian start-up Velmenni completed the world’s first practical test of Li-Fi in 2015, successfully providing lightning-fast wireless internet to an office at speeds 100 times faster than traditional Wi-Fi. Airlines (and airports) are now eyeing the tech to supercharge their existing wireless options. Li-Fi, because of its reliance on transmission via broadcasted light, will act as a supplemental internet option in the future, working in tandem with Wi-Fi.