The Science of Wi-Fi on Airplanes (2019) | Hacker News Reader

The Science of Wi-Fi on Airplanes (2019)

onezero.medium.com

47 pointstosh27 comments

And here I thought it would be an article about the psychological experiment being done on passengers to see how many times they would toggle Wi-Fi on and off and try to reload the captive web portal pages only to find that the internet still wasn’t working despite being promised internet on the flight.

Maybe it’s just United, but 9/10 times it’s just broken.

Do you happen to know what system was being used in these cases?

United seems to use at least four different services [1] (Gogo ATG for US flights on smaller planes, Panasonic for international routes, Thales for the US, and ViaSat for US and transatlantic routes).

[1] https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/travel/inflight/wifi-co...

I just experienced this on an American flight (Panasonic), I want my $29 back.

Submit a refund request.

https://youtu.be/me4BZBsHwZs

I had a United flight from SFO to YVR late last year and to my surprise, despite the notes that audio / video calls are disabled, I was able to have a crisp and clear FaceTime call! I was blown away by this, I always thought that the end-to-end bandwidth is sparingly low for such applications.

In Europe we don't even think that such thing as WiFi on a plane is something possible.

Huh? Unless you're talking about the ultra-low-cost segment, in-flight Wi-Fi is widely available in Europe.

I think that out of the fourty european airines about two of them offer inflight wifi and I remember this being available only fon longhaul, i.e. transatlantic flights.

Well, that hasn‘t been the case for quite some time: https://www.edreams.com/blog/in-flight-wifi/

I‘ve used it on at least five different ones myself. Except for the low-cost airlines, I‘d say it‘s the norm these days, not the exception.

I was just in Qatar Airways flights that had “Super Wi-Fi”. It was barely enough for WhatsApp and Messages. Got 3.0 Kbps using fast.com

Airline WiFi providers usually throttle video streaming (which fast.com shows up as) to limit bandwidth usage.

Satellite connectivity in general has very restrictive usage policies and throttling.

Ground 2 Air services like GoGo can be much better, but not when they have a super narrow chunk of cellular spectrum. Gigabit to the plane is possible cheaply if the ground to air spectrum was available and you can put in a few towers to cover the flight path. GoGo doesn't have more than a few hundred towers for continental US coverage... Much cheaper than a satellite!

> Satellite connectivity in general has very restrictive usage policies and throttling.

That's no longer true, in my experience. Both Viasat and Gogo 2Ku are much faster than ATG in the US, and I've been able to stream VOD quite reliably a couple of times.

The latency is an order of magnitude higher, but given that using voice services is not allowed anyway, the only advantage of ATG to me is slightly faster interactivity on SSH sessions.

That said, Gogo's ATG seems to be pretty outdated. I've had better experiences with the European EAN, which is a hybrid ATG and satellite network.

> GoGo doesn't have more than a few hundred towers for continental US coverage... Much cheaper than a satellite!

I don't think a few hundred towers are enough to cover the entire US, at least not with acceptable bandwidth. EAN, for example, has more than 300 base stations and still only covers part of Europe, and Europe is much smaller than the US.

The article is >3 years old, heads up.

Any reason to think this won’t win long term? https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/19/23412393/starlink-aviati...

It depends on their pricing. Starlink will charge airlines much more per connection than they will charge a rural household. If competitors like GoGo have a cheaper offering, there’s a good chance that several airlines go with the cheaper option even if it’s much slower. The airlines don’t actually care about what internet provider is the best value, they care about saying that they offer in flight Wi-Fi.

Starlink will broadly charge the amount they can charge to maximise revenue, which will be the same as gogo can charge with their offering.

Unless Gogo can massively reduce the cost of their satellite options they’re going to struggle.

GoGo can just amp up their continental offerings, expanding coverage is much cheaper for Gogo than for Starlink.

The main limiting factor for both is spectrum, Gogo has gotten really far considering their tiny spectrum allocation.

If GoGo is limited to 10Mbps, another airline could get an easy competitive advantage with starlink.

You'd struggle to find enough people picking one airline over the other for better wifi to fill a narrow body jet.

The competition is also ramping up their capacity so I don't think Starlinks bandwidth will remain unmatched for long.

What an atrocious user experienceedium give to their viewers. I made it to the first paragraph, whilst the site loaded and reloaded as it determined whether I was to be trusted with their text.

The article? What happened exactly?

GP is complaining about Medium’s website UX, not the author’s content.

If the author chose to publish on Medium, it's the author's UX too

I assume it hit them with the “sign in to view” thing you can get around with incognito mode

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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