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American Airlines drops its lawsuit against Gogo
Last week, American Airlines filed a lawsuit against GoGo to get out of its contract with the in-flight internet provider. The airline found "materially" better service with a competing company, a situation that would force Gogo to provide a new proposal that American could ultimately reject if it found a better deal or service elsewhere. It looks like American and Gogo have found better ground, however -- Gogo just announced that American dismissed its lawsuit. It's not too surprising, as Gogo said last week it was in the process of preparing a competing proposal to match what American had found with rival provider ViaSat.
Gogo's next generation in-flight WiFi launches next year
Gogo's new 2Ku in-flight WiFi might not be as fast as your home internet connection, but it gets the job done -- and a lot faster than current in-flight connectivity. But how much will it cost? When will consumers get to use it? And of course, just how secure is the satellite internet service? For the answers to those questions and more, I sat down at a brief roundtable interview with CEO Michael Small and Vice President of Product Management Blane Boynton at the company's Chicago headquarters.
We pushed the in-flight WiFi of the future to its limit
It shouldn't have worked, but I streamed an episode of Last Week Tonight, a Twitch broadcast of Fallout 4, the premiere episode of Aziz Ansari's Master of None and Meow the Jewels all at once, all on airplane WiFi. In-flight WiFi giant Gogo demoed its next-gen version of mile-high connectivity, 2Ku, above the overcast November skies of Gary, Indiana, bragging 98 percent coverage around the world (the poles don't play nicely with airborne internet) at peak speeds of 70 Mbps. The reality is transfers much slower than that on a plane with roughly 25 journalists, business folks and Gogo staff all doing the same as me: trying to break the internet for about an hour.
Gogo gets the green light for its next-gen in-flight internet
In-flight internet comes with a kind of technological ambivalence -- the fact that it exists at all feels like a complete miracle, but at the same time it almost always totally sucks. Don't worry though, it's about to get better: Gogo, one of the largest providers of commercial in-flight internet, just got approval from the FAA to launch its next generation of mile-high internet. If testing goes well, you could be pulling down 70 Mbps on select flights later this year.
Gogo's internet TV service debuts on Brazilian airline's planes
It looks like Gogo's speedy 2Ku internet technology for international flights is ready for a wider launch. The company is outfitting all the planes in GOL's fleet -- a budget Brazilian airline -- with the technology, which promises 70 Mbps peak speeds. If 2Ku can truly deliver, passengers will have internet access with around 20 times the bandwidth of Gogo's first-gen air-to-ground internet. Since the tech can theoretically handle more load than other, notoriously slow in-flight connections, GOL is also installing Gogo's Vision video-on-demand service and Gogo TV on its planes. It's actually the first airline ever to order the company's Internet Protocol television (IPTV) product, which was designed to stream live TV shows to people's smartphones, tablets or laptops. Gogo will be done installing all these upgrades for GOL's passengers by mid-2016. It might also bring 2Ku to other airlines in the near future, seeing as it had always planned for a full-scale launch to happen this year.
Delta's in-flight WiFi is about to get a whole lot faster
If you've flown Delta recently (or most domestic airlines) and tried to use the onboard Gogo WiFi, you know that it's often a crapshoot. A combination of where you're flying over and the number of passengers attempting to use it leads to either a decent connection (yay!), one that's slow as a snail (ugh), or none at all ($#!%). Look, we need to remember that sending tweets at 35,000 feet is basically magic. But being able to stream even a low-res YouTube clip would really make flying a happier experience.
