Our answer to all this discussion is quite simple: if you want quality and to use a system which is being used by major world airlines and aicraft operators including access to the world's biggest ads-b network you have to pay. Like anything else on the web there are free alternative but of course not professionaly maintained and some of them with dubious quality.
Ooops. I'm back. I actually was not coming back; but a google to direct me to a another thread here, so I checked this one.
I guess the difference in my perspective is that I perceive that the network is primarily composed of hobbyists, not "professionals". It'd be interesting to have actual figures on that. I'm talking about the people that own boxes and feed the network - not corporate subscribers.
Now, I guess it is true that some hobbyists just can't stand having anything less than a 'professional' network. But the network has a lot of warts - large coverage gaps - for which you need to recruit and maintain new members to fill.
Are those people "professionals"? I suspect that by and large, the answer is no. They are probably hobbyists that have paid substantially for your hardware.
I would be much more sympathetic to AirNav's position if Airnav was expanding network coverage at its own expense. But it isn't. Instead it is trying to expand its network by inducing people to pay for the privilege of feeding your network.
Maybe I'm in the minority; but it seems to me to be almost an abusive relationship that you want to develop with your clients. (Here I mean those clients that own and operate boxes that share on the network.)
What I think is that it's probably just a matter of time before an alternative network saps away AirNav's momentum (and limits or even reverses its network growth) unless AirNav can figure out a way to be more responsive to folks like me. Sorry, I just can't get any warm fuzzy feelings about a company that asks me to whip out my credit card every week for the privilege of feeding them their product.