You may bang on the legacy airlines, but American Airlines has a good thing going here with Gogo. The outfit has just completed installation of in-flight WiFi on 150 of its MD-80 aircraft, and in order to give you a better idea of how to prepare, it's now launching an online widget that'll let you know if your bird will enable web surfing when you get on. The tool is completely web-based, so any PC or smartphone can access it; the only real knock is that it only informs you of a "yes" or "no" 24 hours prior to departure, so it's still impossible to book a flight 3 months out and know for certain if you'll be able to hop online. This is definitely something that should be adopted by the other airlines (pronto!), but we can't help but dream of the day when something like this is unnecessary due to in-flight internet becoming completely ubiquitous. Ah, the future -- how you tease us so. Demonstration vid is after the break.
@[Highest Ranked] This new hidden via down-rank thing just makes me even more curious to read and find out what was bad enough to get sent into oblivion.
One thing to note with Delta is that any flight on an MD-80 or 90 has WiFi, so you can technically book a flight however many months out and know if you'll have WiFi or not. Also, a good bit of their 757s have it as well.
@MRCUR too bad delta is just such a suckass airlines in general. I would know. I've just taken round trips with them. 75% of all my flights with them were delayed. 1/3 of them did not meet the connecting flights. wifi is useless if they cannot even meet their customers' basic needs, which is to transport them from point A to point B.
Although in-flight WiFi should be free, I still think I'd be willing to pay for internet access during a flight once the boredom sets in. Who can live for more than 20 minutes with no web access nowadays? Airlines know this and will milk passengers for every last second spent browsing.
Would it hurt if I asked for a choice between this site layout and the old one? I kinda liked the old one better, less stuff popping out at you plus reading was more "there".
wifi on flights absolutely should cost money... because if they don't, everyone gets on, and the connection gets swamped. It's like free wifi in hotels- it sounds great, but then you get there and the performance is so horrible that it's totally unusable, because everyone in the building is trying to use it for torrents or whatever. (this has happened to me a lot lately, and as a result I've switched to being a strong proponent of just paying :))
I tried this on an american flight last month, and I was actually shocked at how usable and how low latency it was. I would actually consider using it more often, because I think the price is fair considering the proportional cost of the service and the technology involved. Certainly more practical for business travelers than casual use. Being able to clock a little more work makes it more than worth it if you need it.
It absolutely does not have the bandwidth however to sustain the use of the entire cabin, and if it was free, you *might* be able to download one email the whole flight.
I would have to experience free in-flight wifi before I could make a judgment. First off, this page on Engadget is ~23KB, so I don't think that loading would be that big of an issue. But again, I would have to experience it. Just hopefully you don't get some idiot who tries to torrent on a flight.
Unfortunately link saturation isn't just dependent on bandwidth. Even with decent QOS management, if you get enough people on a relatively high latency (compared to ground networks - it was better than I expected, but it's still no better than your cell phone's 3G service, which is not meant for sharing), low bandwidth connection, you start having problems with increased latency, timeouts, dropped packets, etc. It doesn't matter if there's bandwidth left over if you can't open a socket to engadet to download the page at all. (sometimes this happens *because* of the QOS management)
This is the kind of thing I've seen increasingly on free internet services in recent years, including the free wifi at, as I mentioned, several hotels, and at our local airport. Thanks to netbooks, ipod touches, etc, more and more people are traveling with wifi enabled devices, and thanks to services like facebook, they want to use them constantly.
For the airlines and hotels it makes more sense to charge a fee to keep usage at a reasonable level and bring in a small amount of dedicated funds for the service (as well as for measuring usage trends). Personally, I'd rather pay the fee and actually be able to use the service when I want to.
That said, I also don't think the fees should be over $10 for a 4-8hour flight, or $10 per day for a hotel. It's enough to restrict use to those who need it, while still being affordable for those of us who are flying coach for a reason. And any hotel that charges $10 or more for internet when they are still only connected by a single T1 should be scolded profoundly. :)
And airports that want to charge you $10 to use the net during your 2 hour layover... ugh, give me a break.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
posted November 19th 2009 5:51PM
Now if only I could check the girth of my seatmates 24 hours in advance.
first!
OK never mind. Second!
@[Highest Ranked]
My first downrank on the new comment system!
@[Highest Ranked] This new hidden via down-rank thing just makes me even more curious to read and find out what was bad enough to get sent into oblivion.
@DanielT Yeah, I know! "Don't read this, this comment is useless, don't read it...don't..."
@[Highest Ranked]
Unfortunately Highest Ranked, your comment is not the Highest Ranked.
@ all of you..
wrong, wrong, wrong! I can't be down-ranked. I'm Highest Ranked!!
This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion.
Too bad I'll have to fly on American Airlines...
@thethirdmoose: Why do you hate America (n airlines)?
If the WiFi isn't free, it's useless for me.
But then again, I don't fly AA.
Ubiquitous: Yes. Cheap: HELLZ NO.
One thing to note with Delta is that any flight on an MD-80 or 90 has WiFi, so you can technically book a flight however many months out and know if you'll have WiFi or not. Also, a good bit of their 757s have it as well.
@MRCUR too bad delta is just such a suckass airlines in general. I would know. I've just taken round trips with them. 75% of all my flights with them were delayed. 1/3 of them did not meet the connecting flights. wifi is useless if they cannot even meet their customers' basic needs, which is to transport them from point A to point B.
delta, you suck.
Although in-flight WiFi should be free, I still think I'd be willing to pay for internet access during a flight once the boredom sets in. Who can live for more than 20 minutes with no web access nowadays? Airlines know this and will milk passengers for every last second spent browsing.
Re-testing comment system.
It requires Flash so it won't work on most smartphones
Would it hurt if I asked for a choice between this site layout and the old one? I kinda liked the old one better, less stuff popping out at you plus reading was more "there".
Now if they could only feed me and give me a whole canned coke we would be getting somewhere
@digitallysick And no, I will not pay $6.00 for 1 beer
@digitallysick That however, I agree with. The lack of complimentary food is a crime against humanity (literally, stop starvin' us folks).
@digitallysick You should be flying on Delta then. I always get full cans of soda, and often get free snackies, too.
wifi on flights absolutely should cost money... because if they don't, everyone gets on, and the connection gets swamped. It's like free wifi in hotels- it sounds great, but then you get there and the performance is so horrible that it's totally unusable, because everyone in the building is trying to use it for torrents or whatever. (this has happened to me a lot lately, and as a result I've switched to being a strong proponent of just paying :))
I tried this on an american flight last month, and I was actually shocked at how usable and how low latency it was. I would actually consider using it more often, because I think the price is fair considering the proportional cost of the service and the technology involved. Certainly more practical for business travelers than casual use. Being able to clock a little more work makes it more than worth it if you need it.
It absolutely does not have the bandwidth however to sustain the use of the entire cabin, and if it was free, you *might* be able to download one email the whole flight.
@devwild
I would have to experience free in-flight wifi before I could make a judgment. First off, this page on Engadget is ~23KB, so I don't think that loading would be that big of an issue. But again, I would have to experience it. Just hopefully you don't get some idiot who tries to torrent on a flight.
Sweet! pr0n at 30,000 feet!
Unfortunately link saturation isn't just dependent on bandwidth. Even with decent QOS management, if you get enough people on a relatively high latency (compared to ground networks - it was better than I expected, but it's still no better than your cell phone's 3G service, which is not meant for sharing), low bandwidth connection, you start having problems with increased latency, timeouts, dropped packets, etc. It doesn't matter if there's bandwidth left over if you can't open a socket to engadet to download the page at all. (sometimes this happens *because* of the QOS management)
This is the kind of thing I've seen increasingly on free internet services in recent years, including the free wifi at, as I mentioned, several hotels, and at our local airport. Thanks to netbooks, ipod touches, etc, more and more people are traveling with wifi enabled devices, and thanks to services like facebook, they want to use them constantly.
For the airlines and hotels it makes more sense to charge a fee to keep usage at a reasonable level and bring in a small amount of dedicated funds for the service (as well as for measuring usage trends). Personally, I'd rather pay the fee and actually be able to use the service when I want to.
That said, I also don't think the fees should be over $10 for a 4-8hour flight, or $10 per day for a hotel. It's enough to restrict use to those who need it, while still being affordable for those of us who are flying coach for a reason. And any hotel that charges $10 or more for internet when they are still only connected by a single T1 should be scolded profoundly. :)
And airports that want to charge you $10 to use the net during your 2 hour layover... ugh, give me a break.
@devwild oops, wrong reply, this was supposed to go in my above thread.
damn these fancy new fan-dangled websites :)
see below for my reply :)
@devwild OK, that just didn't work. mods, feel free to delete this.
And people will flood the plane's wifi to check their myspace, facebook, and post twitter updates with "I'M ON A PLANE!!!!"
The first American Airlines flights to have Wi-Fi are the ones to CIenfuegos, Cuba of course...
Using a laptop on one for those little MD-80 planes makes my carpel-tunnel hurt just thinking about it......
If AA owned McDonalds, you would be paying for ketchup and salt, BUT you would be able to check an online widget to see if they were available.....