Potato submarines!

You need many very low power base stations at spaced out channels to make this work. Nowadays WiFi 7 provides some nice anti-congestion and channel optimization features as well, but back then, one slow device was all it took to render wifi useless.

The time prior to that, the outlet had been so abused that the plug just fell out of the socket.

The time prior to that, the plane did not have the advertised features.

Perhaps the signal strength is great, but the actual problems I as a passenger experience seem to be a bit divorced from the potatoes here.

¹"You can crash an outlet?" I'm an SRE. I can do anything. Plug plug into outlet, green light turns off. Wait like 5s, light turns back on. 1s later, green light turns off. Loop. It's a crashloop, essentially. No power provided.