Comment by joshvm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshvm | Hacker News Reader

My experience with in-flight message-only WiFi is that they're just really slow and the ping times are long. Some services are actively blocked, e.g. Skype wouldn't work at all even for text messages, but browsing the internet is usually allowed. My VPN wouldn't work, but I suspect it might have if I used an obfuscated connection instead of OpenVPN or whatever the default is (e.g. over SSL). I could load GMail in the browser and Wikipedia probably would have worked. It's strongly website dependent. Hacker News is extraordinarily resilient to lousy connections and generally the index would always load without any trouble. It works even on a 3 second ping over satellite internet. Very few websites are that tolerant.

The flight crew (BA) knew what's up. They specifically warned us to check which package we were getting, because evidently they get a lot of complaints when people buy the message-only bundle and are surprised that nothing works.

Singapore gave out free passes for single devices last time I flew with them. It was possible to rotate MAC addresses by forgetting the connection and then re-joining. The connection was quite good, you could watch YouTube in potato resolution. It's quite fun to chat to people and send them photos out of the window.

I carry one of those tiny wireless routers in my carry on wherever I go. If I have to buy internet on the plane or if I am in a hotel that limits the number of devices, I always connect through the router and use it as an access point for all the other devices.

The other added benefit is that all my other devices already have my AP's wifi creds and will connect to it automatically.

I've been thinking about doing somethign similar and am really interested in what hardware you're using for this and what your setup looks like. Do you run a VPN service directly on your router, for example?

I use the TP-Link TL-WR902AC for this, it's cheap and has a MAC cloning feature that makes it pretty easy. Unfortunately the firmware isn't updated anymore and it's missing a VPN client, but apart from that it gets the job done.

Which one do you use?

Not GP, but I've been using the GL.iNet Beryl (GL-MT1300) and I'm really happy with it.

I've been intending to do the same with their Mudi (E750) and between not feeling comfortable trusting their builds and being unable to get my own working (upstream openwrt has stability issues and I guess they have some patches to make the modems work properly; still haven't been able to get a properly working image from working through their repos yet).

It's quite frustrating as it's ideal on paper but they fall on the last mile to make it practically open.

What do you do when wifi has a captive portal though requiring a user name and password?

I use my Samsung S10 for exactly this as it has multiple radios that allows connecting to wifi and hotspotting to share that connection with other devices. Great for Chromecasting.

The first device to connect has to go through the captive portal, then the rest doesn’t.

Also works well if your 2nd device doesn’t support captive portals (Chromecast, Tesla car).

you would need a router which supports WISP Repeater mode. some GL.inet products support this

I used just clone the MAC address across my iPhone and laptop and switch between them, so I guess you could use your phone to get through the captive portal and then connect with a travel router that clones the phones MAC address.

> Hacker News is extraordinarily resilient to lousy connections

It really is. Where I live when you run into the limit of your data package, your network is usually throttled to 100kbps. I changed my plan to just 3GB per month because I was staying at home most of the time due to the pandemic. Now I'm pretty much back to my old routines, but I didn't change my plan yet. I have a 45 minute train commute and 3GB can be used up in a few days just browsing reddit and loading news sites.

Anyway, google search, hacker news and facetime audio work as normal at 100kbps. Google maps works with a bit of patience. Virtually nothing else will load. 5 years ago most text-based things worked at this speed albeit slowly. Now everything is so bloated and so much content will not load show until fonts and things are loaded.

I was recently on a United flight and the free 1h "text only" option gave me access to the whole internet, and I could reactivate it after an hour. I think maybe they unlocked it because the flight had a delay - or it was a bug. The flight crew didn't inform us about it though. I also didn't notice any other people using it.

The connection was pretty damn good, considering I was somewhere over the Atlantic. It was shocking to me how much more enjoyable the flight was, makes me wonder how hooked I am to being connected. (I also had extra legroom and an empty seat next to me though.)

It sounds like what you're getting on a plane is actually satellite internet.

Satellite is always what you get on planes if you fly over an ocean. If you're flying over land, sometimes it's satellite and sometimes it comes from ground-based cells. Depends on the airline and the plane's equipment.

Yes, it is. One of the biggest providers is called GoGo who in turn use satellites from SES. My comment about satellite was that I've also worked in very remote places using much poorer links and HN still works, amazingly.

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