Flight Wi-Fi

About yes­ter­day around 7:00 pm, Vir­gin America’s ran test their GoGo flight Wi-Fi, 35k feet over San Fran­sico. Yeah, it’s in-flight Wi-Fi. Pretty cool, huh? I always wished there’s a Wi-Fi on an air­plane and now it’s come true. The speed might be slower than cable modem but still faster than DSL (shared at 3.6Mbps down­stream and 1.8Mbps upstream.). And the fact that pay $13 (if it’s over 13 hours) isn’t a very expen­sive at all. And yet, thanks to them that they won’t block porn.

Some facts:

1. 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. Time to plan a camp­ing trip.
2. Total band­width is not as fast as Cable Modem, but it seems faster than slow DSL. (We were shar­ing 3.6Mbps down and 1.8Mbps up, which isn’t bad at all, on this Vir­gin Amer­ica test flight, and it felt this fast when bench­ing.)
3. 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, but Ryan showed about a mbit down. )
4. You have to pay. Vir­gin Amer­ica charges, for exam­ple $9.95 for flights under 3 hours, and $12.95 on flights over 3 hours.
5. You will still need to close your lap­tops and shut off your devices until you reach cruis­ing alti­tude.
6. 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, but they may fil­ter this on real flights. (See Below, cour­tesy of Nick Bil­ton from the NYTimes.)
7. 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.
8. WiFi porn won’t be blocked by Vir­gin Amer­ica (or Amer­i­can Air­lines accord­ing to a test we per­formed ear­lier this week). But block­ing porn is silly — peo­ple can eas­ily play porn on DVDs or pre­down­loaded files, but peo­ple gen­er­ally have refrained so there’s no rea­son to think they’ll do oth­er­wise now.
9. Flights using Go Go ser­vice will be able to con­nect to a VPN.
10. You can file share with other com­put­ers on the 802.11 a/b/g Wi-Fi net­work. That’s good for gam­ing, but also, make sure your fire­wall is up.

Source: Giz­modo

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