I find myself on AA flight #3 headed to LAX from NY’s JFK. Today marks the first day of Aircell’s Gogo inflight service going live for the masses. It will be available on flights from NYC to LA, Miami and San Francisco. The 8AM flight to Miami from JFK is not a 767-200, so those going south won’t be privy to Aircell’s Gogo service.
The flight is full from what I’m told and Aircell had plenty of people on hand at the gate to promote the service. Exactly how many folks will utilize the service is unknown at this point. I’ll be using my MacBook Pro, iPhone 3G and T-Mobile BlackBerry Curve along with one other smartphone that’s Wi-Fi enabled. I’m in economy so it’s going to be a tight squeeze. Hopefully the lady sitting in front of me won’t lean her seat back, but that’s doubtful. I’ve already got my laptop on my lap as is and it’s not pleasant. I wish one of the manufacturers who I requested a sub-notebook/netbook from had gotten back to me. I’m looking at you Lenovo, HP, Asus, MSI and Dell.
The service unavailable splash screen reveals that Gogo won’t work below 10,000 feet and is only available within the continental U.S. I will individually test all my devices and then simultaneously to see what sort of bandwidth I’m getting.
Speed tests after the jump.
So far Speedtest.net is giving me 1,748 kbps down and roughly 290kbps up.
Another test reveals similar results.
This one’s not so good.
One more test on the laptop and I’ll start testing my iPhone 3G and BlackBerry Curve.
So far so good, folks. The aircrafts are 767s and not 727s. If you’re on a flight for more than three hours than I think $13 is worth it. The only caveat here is that American Airlines only supports cigarette lighter adapters, so I’m screwed in about an hour when my battery dies. FastMac was supposed to send me an extended battery weeks ago, but they’ve failed to do so. Virgin America on the other hand has normal outlets.
I just tried out the service on my iPhone 3G and it worked well. You have to sign off from each device to export the service to another. It’s a pain, but there for a reason. I’ll get video or time how long it takes to download an app from the app store.
I’m currently on Skype, AIM, and MSN messenger. I tried calling someone over VoIP on Skype but it dropped after five seconds. Service has been good so far. There were a few spots where the connection was sluggish, but otherwise it’s been rock solid.
I’m currently watching Doug’s review on YouTube and there’s no lag for a five-minute video.
One clever IMer just asked me:
and here’s a question, feel free to write about it, if you were to commit a crime, lets say hack something stupid via the wi-fi on flight, where would they extradite you to?
We’ll get the answer soon. Also, I know you’re all wondering how they’re blocking VoIP calls. We’ll have that answer soon.
Oh great! The f*cking stewardess flight attendant just spilled water on my laptop!
VoIP calls are sort of going through, but nothing can be heard on either end. Former CG editor Josh Goldman just tried calling said they heard some sort of “digital tune.”
My laptop is going dark in less than 10, so I’m switching to iPhone 3G and/or BlackBerry Curve.
I’ll be back shortly, folks. Leave you questions in comments and I’ll do my best to get them answered.
4:18PM EST - Switched from my dead laptop to my BB. The switchover was easy but I didn’t get a connection for a few minutes. E-mail, browser and BB messenger are all working flawlessly.
To answer your question about VoIP calls I just spoke with Jack Blumenstein, the president and ceo of Aircell. They’ve restricted the packets that enable voip calls but clearly haven’t blocked skype altogether. Connections can be made that may or may not last a few seconds but the audio then becomes garbled.
Just made a call over UMA on my BlackBerry to my brother and it went through. Lasted about a minute. Will get a wav file to post on the site.
The connection is now garbled.
To all the commenters who are telling me to plug in: All outlets need cig lighter adapters. Feh.
5:06PM EST - Update: blackberry uma connection is spotty
Aircell’s tech guy had his nokia n810 and it was running fine
He said bb’s UMA is a problem and they’re working to resolve it now
Also, any winmo device with wifi will work regardless regardless of the devices listed on the gogo site
Cool. Gogo service automatically shuts off when it goes below 10k feet
6:03PM EST - Brief layover in LAX before jumping on a flight back. Leave questions in comments.
6:31PM EST - Bandwidth is prioritized, so if you’re juicing the network by watching video or downloading then your connection gets slower but it won’t stop and other passenger won’t be affected.
One passenger was watching basebll games through sling on the outbound flight.
Just left LAX and I’m back online. I have roughly one hour of laptop juice left, so please feel free to leave a comment or AIM me at crunchtips.
Going to watch some video on fancast and see what it does to my bandwidth.
7:40PM EDT
Currently watching this episode of Family Guy. Bandwidth is holding steady. Guess there aren’t too many people using Gogo right now.
7:42PM EDT
RE: VPN. Folks from Aircell are telling me that it’s up to your IT department based on how strong the Wi-Fi connection needs to be. I know a couple AA execs were connected over VPN on the outbound flight from JFK to LAX.
Do you guys want to know anything else?
[Devin says: Peter and I played this little fridge magnet game. Worked fine, so no upstream issues.]
Facebook chatting with the boss, MA, now.
Just ran four fancast streams and bandwidth went down a bit.
Running three Hulu streams with no noticeable lag on any of the streams. Trying to Bit Torrent, but I’ve got zilch going down or up.
Spoke too soon. My streams are getting choppy.
8:15PM EDT
I have roughly 15 minutes left of juice on my laptop. Better get your questions in now.
8:17PM EDT
Torrenting a 233MB file now with download speeds ranging from 0B/s to 3.1Kbps with nothing uploading.
8:25PM EDT
Well, that’s it for me, folks. My laptop is about to kick the can, so I’ll be switching over to my BlackBerry/iPhone 3G for the remainder of the flight. Feel free to email me at peter at crunchgear dot com with any questions and I’ll do my best to get them answered.
Wow, that’s pretty cool. Now if we could get a macbook pro battery that would last longer than 70 minutes, we’d be golden!
I travel a lot is it worth the cost?
The good thing about AA is that it does have power on a big chunk of its seats (every third row); see the seatmap at http://www.aa.com/aa/i18nForward.do?p=/aboutUs/ourPlanes/boeing767200DomInter.jsp when you’re booking your flight.
A 727-200? Could you have meant 767 maybe?
The in-flight speed you’re getting seems to be twice as fast as the speed I’m getting right this moment on land, using my Verizon wireless card!
Is it worth the cost? Dude, its ten bucks a flight. If you’d rather read SkyMall (again), I guess its not worth it. Otherwise, it seems like a great deal. I would have expected it to be about $20/flight when it launched.
i remember doing this back in…2005. funny.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/07/06/profile-connexion-boeing/
oh dear god i hope they ARE blocking voip calls. F having some junior-business man on calls next to you for a cross-country flight. F it i say!
Speedtest.net for the love of God! :)
Wonder how those packets are coming through - probably proxied to death. Have you tried Hulu, Netflix, or YouTube?
How high was the latency on pings?
I’d be interested to see if VPN’s worked and if so how well.
It would be cool to see a live video stream through Qik or Flixwagon. Could come in handy if anything happens during the flight… who needs black boxes. We’ve got live screams… i mean streams.
Not bad. How many other users where using the system? Here in lies the real problem; someone is going to try to download a large file and everyone using the system is going to get hosed.
Pretty awesome. Can’t wait for hackers to do their business up in teh air!
Please, please let them make VoIP only for emergencies. Or block it all together.
VoIP is blocked for the most part. I made it through for a minute before it got canned.
@michael arrington — boeing’s solution, which is similar to Aircell’s own corporate equipment for satellite-based Internet is too heavy for commercial aircraft, costly to install and maintain, and takes a plane out of the sky for almost two weeks to get all the hardware in there.
Gogo hardware weighs slightly more than two pieces of luggage, and is completely installed in an overnight layover at the gate.
@Deanna — VOIP, as I understand it, is made available via telephone handset for crew. So in case of emergency, they’re only a call away from help.
Another neat and under-reported facet of the technology is mechanical data transmission. Like if a windshield wiper breaks during flight (source of a six-hour delay for me once), the maintenance hub can be pinged immediately and begin sourcing the repair, instead of waiting for the plane to land before diagnosing repair needs.
We’ve been helping Aircell on the interactive marketing and design of the brand and the product for about a year, and I can’t wait for this to roll-out nationwide. Aside fro my own selfish personal reasons of wanting inflight Internet (personal), and seeing how the Internet is used in this unchartered corner of UX (professional) the Aircell and Gogo teams have really brought a win-win solution for all parties that will only grow in appeal and bandwidth. It’s a great day for the Internet!
I’m bound for SFO from JFK and I confirm that the service is very very good. :-)
Wake me up, before you gogo!
awesome…question: flight weather? meaning did u go thru any storms, and what happened then? or basically has anyone used laptop, cell, etc inflight during said weather events…I would also be curious to see if in a flight up to Alaska at dawn breaking the horizon if there was any intrusions on downloads because of solar flares etc….please advise…
Someone wouldn’t happen to have a fullsized screen-capture of the gogo portal, would they?
Paid 9.95 for the inflight Internet, only to find that they cripple skype. I don’t pay for censored/crippled Internet and nothing was mentioned about that before I ran my card. I asked for a refund and they refused so I got the credit card company involved and got my money back. I guess the only way to really have unfiltered net in the sky is to do it via encrypted vpn traffic.