Trains, Airplane and Seating Strategies

As an avid train commuter I have often wondered about the manner in which train seats are occupied. Suppose you board a train at the first station, half of the 4-seat areas are occupied with one or more passengers and half are empty, offering you the promise of a whole 4-seat area to yourself.

The inexperienced passenger will probably opt for one of the empty 4-seat areas. Alas there are more stations on the way and the train quickly fills up, people sit next to you, people you did not choose to sit beside. Sometimes it will be someone that invades your personal space, and sometimes it will be someone that feels compelled to shout into their cell phone. If you’re lucky it is someone pleasant and quiet, but a guy called Murphy will never let that happen.  

One way around this is to place your personal bag in the seat beside you and pretend to be deeply immersed in the sports section. This may earn you a neighbor less ride; however there are two problems with this approach:

1. It is anti-social and not very polite to deny someone a seat just because you want your ride to be more pleasant.
2. Most probably, it will be the less pleasant people that request you move your bag so they can have a seat.

Airplanes and first class trains solve this problem by assigning seats per ticket. They also sell different types of tickets at different prices. The main difference between the tickets is (you guessed right) the amount of space you have.This method has two main advantages:

1. It allows airlines to better monetize their service – this is crucial in high cost services.
2. It optimizes seat allocation – there are no disputes on seats, people get more or less what they paid for, and the space is allocated in the best possible manner - no passengers stand while other passengers take up two seats.

As Flash Networks is all about optimizing mobile data networks, the allegory is probably well understood by now. Fixed line ISPs are like trains – they have enough space to accommodate all types of behavior and do not need to invest in optimizing their service – their costs are very low so whenever there is a problem they just “add more wagons” or “throw bandwidth at the problem”. However mobile operators cannot use this method, they are like the airlines – they have very high costs, and their resources, like airplanes, need to be obtained well in advance, leaving them with the need to best optimize and monetize their service in order to prosper and avoid pitfalls.

-- Tal Dagan, Director of Product Management