Last week I finally got a chance to experience in-flight internet via GoGo WiFi. I had been hearing about this service from my buddies for several months, but was never lucky enough to be on a plane that actually had it. My main carrier is Delta. Delta acquired Northwest Airlines and while they now operate as a single company and make no mention of NWA anymore, the former NWA planes seem to be last on the list to get upgraded with WiFi. So I waited. Not much of a choice when you live near Detroit. It's a Delta hub.
I'm online!
How much does it cost?
I went for the $9.95 option for now since I don't know how often I'll be on a flight that actually has it in the next 30 days? Once this is widespread I could see going with the 30 day pass to save $$$.
How fast is it?
While the speed test from SpeakEasy.net (my favorite testing site) doesn't show this connection to be blazing fast, it's actually quite speedy in actual use.
SlingPlayer works!
OK, this is extremely cool! I was even able to connect to my Slingbox and watch anything that was recorded on my DVR. Wow! No more having to watch the same movies over and over again on the plane 🙂 In theory I could watch a live broadcast of LOST (which comes on in 30 minutes) instead of watching it later.
Great to have options. It will also be interesting to see what restrictions they put on Apps like this that suck bandwidth going forward. VoIP apps are already prohibited.
Although my App did technically work and make a call, the sound quality was so bad that it wasn't worth it. I'm glad that in-flight calls are prohibited. I just wanted to see if they didn't anything technically to block the ports?
Sanctuary or Workplace
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The one thing I could count on when I flew on long flights was that I could get a lot of work done, especially writing without any "distractions". No email to worry about. No instant messages, no wondering what my friends are doing on Facebook or Twitter, because I was off the grid. Now that Delta says that they'll have 100% of their fleet upgraded with WiFi by the end of the year, I wonder how this will impact my time in the air? Sure I could simply switch off WiFi and work, but the temptation to know what's going on is simply to great. So while I've been waiting for this day to come for quite sometime, it's a mixed blessing. We'll see how it goes. On the other hand I wrote this post in the air! 🙂 The other thing I have to consider is that while I can work on flight that doesn't have WiFi, I usually spend quite a bit of time once I land getting caught up anyway.
Also being able to power my MacBook Pro with my HyperMac external battery now becomes even more important.
Since they’re probably using satellites for these links, I wonder how much of a bottleneck this rapid rollout of all Delta aircraft will create. Going from a few dozen aircraft to hundreds could create serious problems, particularly during peak daytime hours. Traffic could slow to a crawl.
I’ve often thought that a better scheme would use ground-based dish antennas and directional antennas, perhaps a flat phased array, on the aircraft. The aircraft would provide GPS coordinates to point the ground antenna and a cellphone-like handoff would happen whenever an aircraft moved out of range of a ground station. It’d even give the airline crew a legitimate excuse to shut down its Internet link when an aircraft began its descent. And that same link could give the airline crew and maintenance staff a high-speed link from ground to earth.
Schemes like that would do what no satellite-based system can do, provide multiple reuse of the same channels. A single ground station could use the same frequency to talk to a dozen or more aircraft, as long as each was in a different direction. No satellite system looking down can be that discerning.
Sigh, often I feel like Chicken Little warning “The sky is falling.” I feel like I am the only one claiming that, if we’re not careful now, we’ll have billions invested in an ill-designed infrastructure that simply can’t use spectrum efficiently enough to pass all the data we want to cram through it, particularly in densely populated big cities.
I was actually able to do a 2 way ichat, see:
http://www.evdoforums.com/thread12897.html
Actually, GoGo uses EVDO Rev A towers that are “pointing up” for coverage vs. using satellite. More info at:
http://www.evdoinfo.com/content/view/2294/64/
Gogo does not use satellites, they use cell phone base stations directed upwards to cover wide areas.
Installation of gogo equipment is much simpler and quicker than satellite based systems.