Tenzing’s Pricing for United Incorrectly Reported. Alan Reiter gets clarification on United’s new JetConnect with Email service from Verizon Airfone via Tenzing: In fact, the press release explained the service incorrectly. It’s is $15.98 per flight, which include up to 2 kilobytes (2K) per email message. Each additional K per email message is another 10 cents, not overall. That is, you can download 100 2K messages and pay $15.98; add one 3K message and you pay $16.08, and so forth. Of course, you have to use their special client software, and that’s what kills the deal. I can’t believe they haven’t actually done the research on this, but corporations with the resources to allow their employees to spend $20 or $30 per flight on data are inversely unlikely to allow non-virtual private network (VPN) tunneled access to their networks. Some companies do provide some limited POP or IMAP support outside a firewall, but I hear very little about that these days. In meeting with iPass recently about their new iPassConnect client software, they noted that one feature they offer to their corporate customers (who get a customized client for their employees) is to set the timeout that a connection will get dropped if the VPN isn’t enabled. Employees can fire up the laptop, but they can’t actually do anything on the Internet. The VPN has to go live within 30 seconds or a minute or two (depending on the company) or the iPass software kills the feed. I’m basically predicting a failure on this service for United, because they’ve excluded the Fortune 50,000 from using the service by setting it up this way. Their customers will only be leisure travelers who want to spend extra for no good reason, or small business people, or salespeople who use other kinds of accounts. Meanwhile, the hotmail users of the world with no POP access also won’t be able to use this service…. [Wi-Fi Networking News]
