Gizmodo’s Brian Lam went live from Virgin America’s promotional Wi-Fi junket over San Francisco. The carrier’s first Wi-Fi enabled plane will circle the skies above San Francisco during the event and a segment of the YouTube Live show will be streamed from 35,000 feet to an audience on the ground and on-line. Lam posted 10 Things You Need To Know About In Flight Wi-Fi from 30,000 feet.
- Your last bastion of Internet Free peace is gone. Forever. You’ll be forced to work on flights instead of valium napping or reading comic books, and your boss will expect you to be checking email.
- Total bandwidth is not as fast as Cable Modem, but it seems faster than slow DSL. (We were sharing 3.1Mbps down and 1.8Mbps up, which isn’t bad at all, on this Virgin America test flight, and it felt this fast when benching.)
- But bandwidth is shared between customers. Aircell’s GoGo a 3GHz EVDO-Rev A related tech modded for ground to air, started crawling as soon as other passengers signed on. (I got a test result measuring 66kbps down at one point.)
- You have to pay. Virgin America charges, for example $9.95 for flights under 3 hours, and $12.95 on flights over 3 hours.
- You will still need to close your laptops and shut off your devices until you reach cruising altitude.
- Most airlines, even those that are not blocking ports, are blocking known VOIP ports. For our sanity. Although I WAS able to initiate a really solid iChat video session. (See Below, courtesy of Nick Bilton from the NYTimes.)
- Although plenty of airlines will have Wi-Fi by the end of next year, I prefer Virgin America because they’ve got 110v AC power plugs in coach.
- WiFi porn won’t be blocked by Virgin America or American Airlines (according to a test earlier this week.)
- Flights using Go Go service will be able to connect to a VPN.
- You can file share with other computers on the Wi-Fi network. That’s good for gaming, but also, make sure your firewall is up.
WiFi service starts on a single Virgin aircraft on November 24th, then expands to their entire fleet by second quarter 2009. Glenn Fleishman has a backgrounder and a nice interview with the Aircell CEO (below).
CNET’s Kara Tsuboi files a user report (below). Play the Globetrekker theme (MP-3).
USA Today lists other carriers with Wi-Fi plans:
- Air Canada says it will offer Gogo starting in spring on several Airbus A319s that fly to the USA, with plans to expand it to the rest of the fleet later. Aircell plans to build cell towers in Canada so that Canadian airlines will be able to provide Wi-Fi on domestic flights.
- Alaska Airlines plans to test a satellite-based system on a Boeing 737 plane in 2009. Operated by California-based Row 44, the carrier plans to expand it to the rest of its fleet if the test is successful. The airline prefers a satellite system because many of its flights fly over water.
- Southwest Airlines has also signed with Row 44 and will test it in four aircraft early next year, spokeswoman Whitney Eichinger says.
- Delta spokeswoman Betsy Talton says Delta will introduce GoGo in two aircraft by the end of the year. The airline expects to have more than 330 aircraft complete by summer 2009. It plans to extend it to its Northwest subsidiary, as well.
- Continental Airlines plans to introduce an e-mail and instant-messaging service operated by LiveTV in the summer.
