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In flight Internet

Brent

Brent

Admiral
Admiral
WOW, this is so cool, I'm in a plane, thousands of feet up, flying cross country from Los Angeles to Charlotte, NC, and I'm on the Internet for the trip! Getting pretty good speeds for flying through the air, 44 KB/sec download, not bad, perfect for surfing.

It wasn't exactly real cheap, $12 for the whole flight, but worth it when flying cross country. I really love technology sometimes. This works great on my new Netbook I just bought, I get like 9 hours of battery life with it.
 
I flew through Charlotte the other day, not a bad little airport.

I flew Delta and they were apparently offering free wi-fi on their flights. Seeing as I was on vacation though, there was no way in hell I was bringing a laptop with me to try it out.
 
I'm flying in a few weeks, I'll have to see if there's free wifi on my flight. I doubt it, though. I'm a cheapskate.
 
You're on the internet while flying 35,000 feet above the Earth, and you're on a Star Trek forum. That's almost like actually being onboard the Enterprise.
 
ShamelessMcBundy said:
What airline is this? What service do they use? I mean, yeah that's really cool, but some details, man!
Click to expand...

I'm flying US Airways, and the Internet Service is through Gogo Inflight Internet - http://www.gogoinflight.com/gogo/splash.do

I turned on my laptop, brought up the Wifi networks, and it has one called "gogoinflight" you connect to it, then it redirects you to their webpage where you can buy the service, have to create an account, you can select to just buy it for the duration of the flight, or there are packages if you fly a lot.

I'm connected with a full signal at 802.11g speeds.

I don't know how it works while moving, but I haven't lost the connection, its been consistently working. I still have 6 hours on my battery left even with the wifi on surfing, great little netbook.
 
Technically, you're connected over 3G speeds... the plane's internal network is being connected to the ground through Gogo's skyward pointing 3G cell network. I believe it's a theoretical max of 7 Mbit/s, but that's spread over all the users on the plane. Which is why if you try to use any video streaming service, they throttle you down to nothing.

What's fun is to go to http://flightaware.com/ and be able to track your flight and schedule in near real time. In July I had wifi on a delayed flight and I could track just how badly I was going to miss my connection :p I was able to send/receive texts on my laptop using Google Voice too, which was pretty neat.
 
I was able to use my iPhone 4 and video chat with my wife and son, just before he went to bed on my last flight to Charlotte. Plus be productive on my iPad, updated some powerpoint presentations and downloaded a book.
 
I just got back from Czech republic yesterday. I could have used that. One e-mail cost me 4.99 :( I barely made the flight and needed to tell the wife I made it.
 
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