wake me up before you gogo…inflight wifi comes to AA
by Justin Horn on Nov 6th, 2008 @ 1:47 pmAs I’m sure you know inflight wifi has been a hot topic this year and has been available on one of the largest US airlines, American Airlines, via Gogo for a several months now. It is only available on select flights, but I’m sure in the next 12-24 months this is going to be huge. Miami (MIA) to New York (JFK) is on that short list so it looks like I need to go visits 5th ave apple in the big apple again! Gogo is only available on AA, but will soon be coming to Air Canada, Delta Air Lines, and Virgin America.
So how does this technology work you ask? Well Gogo’s parent company Aircell has special cell phone towers that have their radio signals directed up to the sky’s above instead of along the ground. Special receivers on the underbelly of the aircraft receive this signal and then distribute it inside the aircraft via traditional wifi. [more info on wiki]
The speed seems to be similar to the speed we get with your 3g connection on the iPhone (while standing still that is) based on a test flight Walter Mossberg took back in June of this year:
On my test flight, download speeds varied from 266 kilobits per second to about 1.4 megabits per second, with the most typical speeds hovering between 500 and 600 kbps. Upload speeds were between 250 and 300 kbps. I found that most of the tasks I tested, except for streaming video, felt smooth and normal.
My question is how well does it work when there are more than a couple people connected at one time? If the main pipe is about 600kbps and you share it with 20 other people on a packed plane that’s going to bring it to a crawl. Hopefully in the not too distant future these speeds will be increased, but still this is a really great start!
Oh, almost forgot…don’t get your hopes up for unlimted in flight calling on this connection though, VoIP services will be blocked. Honestly though I doubt with these connection speeds it would even be possible anyway.
Here is a snippet of the AA press release:
Gogo® Inflight Internet is now available to customers for $12.95 on select flights between New York (JFK) and Los Angeles (LAX), New York (JFK) and San Francisco (SFO), & New York (JFK) and Miami (MIA) on American’s Boeing 767-200 flights.
Each paid Gogo session includes full Internet, VPN, and email access. From the sign in page, you can also access AA.com, The Wall Street Journal Online and Frommers destination guides. Cell phone and Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services are not available.
The supported devices page list the iPhone at the very top right next to the Curve.
And it should work with any laptop including Safari on Mac OS X.
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