Gogo In-Air Wireless Internet – Taking Off or Slowing Down?

Back in 2009 I wrote an article about Gogo inflight Internet service and how I was able to get download speeds between 1.2 to 2.1 Mb/s and upload speeds of 0.1 to 0.36 Mb/s. Inflight internet was new back then and the speeds were acceptable. Here we are three years later and you would think that the inflight internet would be better, but sadly it is not.

I m writing this news post on a non-stop flight from STL to SEA on an Alaska Airlines flight and the GoGo Wireless on this flight is mediocre at best with download speeds ranging between 0.2 to 0.5 Mb/s. The internet speed on this flight is on par with the service that I have gotten on other flights in recent months, so this isn’t a rare event of poor speeds. As you can imagine, surfing the web is choppy with these speeds and streaming any videos is out of the question.

I jumped into a chat with Gogo customer support and was told that the internet would speed up as the flight went on and that they only offer the equivalent of 3G data speeds. It looks like they are still on the 3Mbps data data connection that they started out with. Inflight internet companies might have been able to get away with slow speeds back in 2009, but going into the future they have to improve this if they want to continue to charge $12.95 per fight for in-air internet. It would be nice to get on HBO GO to be able to watch the season premier of True Blood during my fligt, but maybe that will be possible in three more years.