What air travelers need to know about keeping connected
According to Scott Ewalt, vice president of product and customer experience at Boingo Wireless, you have the iPhone to thank.
[...] Ewalt has seen an exponential growth in broadband bandwidth consumption among consumers.
Airports, he noted, are places where people have time to kill, which is why Boingo offers connection speeds of 5 megabits per second for free to travelers in airports with Boingo technology.
When in-flight Wi-Fi was first introduced in 2008 by Gogo, it was accomplished using what’s called an Air-to-Ground (ATG) system, which employed cellular networks to beam a signal into the sky for passing aircraft.
“Our ATG system disrupted this industry and has enabled an entirely new passenger experience in-flight,” said Blane Boynton, vice president of product management and network solutions at Gogo.
Gogo still uses the ATG system, but in 2014, the company upped the Internet ante when it introduced its 2Ku technology, which uses satellites to beam signals down to passing planes, allowing for connectivity speeds of at least 70 megabits per second.
Gogo is also making enhancements to its ground-based technology that will allow aircraft flying over North America to switch between the ATG and 2Ku systems, depending on which one is faster at any given moment — similarly to how a cell phone automatically connects to the fastest network.
If you’re flying on a plane that’s not equipped with satellite technology, you may encounter service interruptions and difficulty performing tasks that require a higher bandwidth (such as video streaming).
[...] Gogo’s ATG system upgrades are complete, there are a few ways to speed things up.