[HN Gopher] The Science of Wi-Fi on Airplanes (2019)
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The Science of Wi-Fi on Airplanes (2019)
Author : tosh
Score : 42 points
Date : 2023-02-02 12:21 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (onezero.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (onezero.medium.com)
| tetris11 wrote:
| 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.
| crescentfresh wrote:
| The article? What happened exactly?
| [deleted]
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| GP is complaining about Medium's website UX, not the author's
| content.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| If the author chose to publish on Medium, it's the author's
| UX too
| gymbeaux wrote:
| I assume it hit them with the "sign in to view" thing you can
| get around with incognito mode
| ddulaney wrote:
| > 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
| octoluke wrote:
| The article is >3 years old, heads up.
| AkshayGenius wrote:
| 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.
| s1mon wrote:
| 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.
| lxgr wrote:
| 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...
| ec109685 wrote:
| Any reason to think this won't win long term?
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/19/23412393/starlink-aviati...
| Thlom wrote:
| The competition is also ramping up their capacity so I don't
| think Starlinks bandwidth will remain unmatched for long.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| 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.
| midasuni wrote:
| 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.
| simfree wrote:
| 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.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| If GoGo is limited to 10Mbps, another airline could get an
| easy competitive advantage with starlink.
| snotrockets wrote:
| You'd struggle to find enough people picking one airline
| over the other for better wifi to fill a narrow body jet.
| richsu-ca wrote:
| 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
| simfree wrote:
| 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!
| lxgr wrote:
| > 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.
| denysonique wrote:
| In Europe we don't even think that such thing as WiFi on a plane
| is something possible.
| lxgr wrote:
| Huh? Unless you're talking about the ultra-low-cost segment,
| in-flight Wi-Fi is widely available in Europe.
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