This is a singular lawsuit. A customer of in flight WIFI provider GOGO, American Airlines, is suing them for essentially sucking, citing VSAT as a superior service.
“After carefully evaluating the new technology and services in the marketplace, American has decided to exercise its rights under the Agreement and recently notified Gogo that ViaSat offers an in-flight connectivity system that materially improves on Gogo’s air-to-ground system,” the suit says.
American says ViaSat offers a faster service that is currently installed on United Airlines, Jet Blue and Virgin America planes. American currently uses Gogo for its regional aircraft and on domestic flights, primarily Boeing 737s.
“American continually evaluates in-flight connectivity service to determine what best meets our customers’ needs and wants,” American said in a statement on Monday. “We’ve notified Gogo of a competitor’s offering, and we will evaluate all of our options.”
Gogo said American notified it earlier this month that a competitor’s service is an improvement over Gogo’s early generation air-to-ground service that is used on about 200 of American’s aircraft.
“We have no comment on the merits of this litigation, but we would like to note that American is a valued customer of ours and that we look forward to resolving the disagreement regarding contract interpretation that led to this declaratory judgment action,” Gogo said in a statement late Monday night.
According to its contract, Gogo is allowed to submit a competing proposal which Gogo said it intends to do related to its satellite technology, 2Ku.
“We believe that 2Ku is the best performing technology in the market and look forward to discussing our offer with American,” Gogo said.
As such, shares of GOGO have been decapitated by more than 40%.
As for VSAT: is it possible to get better publicity than a major airline suing for the rights to do business with you, based on the merits of your superior service and technology?
Shares are soaring.
$WIFI is up too, but I guess it could just be bouncing with the market, like lots of other stuff. Plus they do the airports as opposed to the actual planes.
The bad news: Gogo sucks. The good news: sometimes your device won’t connect.