High Speed, high altitude, wireless broadband
In flight wireless broadband – the start of internet everywhere
Our MD Steve Hodges was in the US recently for a customer visit. He had such a good experience with his in-flight broadband he felt compelled to write about it and email me this blog while he was in the air. So I’ll hand over to Mr Hodges…
I was privileged enough to be invited over to see the offices of Cisco Meraki in San Francisco. We have been a long term supplier to Meraki in London for their infrastructure, phone system and their communications services and we have been fortunate enough to be selected as preferred supplier for their new office fit out coming later in the year.
“What was unusual for me on this flight was the availability of Wi-Fi on the plane!”
Travelling via Calgary for some other investigative work and to see some family, my route took me on a three hour flight via United Airlines from Calgary (YYK) to San Francisco (SFO). The service is good. The small aircraft (76 seats) – seemingly brand new – with spacious leather seats in a 2 x 2 formation. The staff – as you would expect – were full of North American charm and hospitality. What was unusual for me on this flight, however, (and it may be I am just not as well travelled as I thought) was the availability of Wi-Fi on the plane!
I spend a lot of time on the road or on the trains, underground and taxi’s in the UK and in recent times I have travelled to Canada a few times, Hong Kong, Singapore, France, Belgium, Spain and Northern and the Republic of Ireland, but, this is my first experience of being able to get a fairly reliable, reasonable connection while travelling at any sort of speed.
There were a few caveats, some I understand and some I don’t. I understand the cost – $8.00 for an hour and a half and $8.95 for the 3 hour duration of the flight. I also understand why your device had to be in airplane mode but with Wi-Fi switched on (which I didn’t even know was possible) to stop the cellular signal for messing with the planes instruments. However, I didn’t understand why it wouldn’t work below 10,000 feet?!?! I would love to understand what this restriction is (Mr Smith, over to you!) [See my closing paragraph – SS]. Whatever the reason, it was fairly adamant that until we reached said height all you could access was the instruction page.
“The OOKLA speed test app shows results of 1.46Mbps download and .27Mbps upload with a ping of 185 seconds…”
In terms of reliability and usefulness, there are clear warnings that you can’t stream media, no Netflix or such like but there was enough bandwidth and enough speed for me to download the speed test app and then run it!!
The OOKLA speed test app shows results of 1.46Mbps download and .27Mbps upload with a ping of 185 seconds on my first test and then 1.22Mbps download and 0.28Mbps upload with 165ms ping on my second test. But, in reality I was able to use iMessage without an issue, download and read my emails on my iPhone 6. Although I did have to buy another pass to get my laptop online too in order to be able to send this blog to Steve Smith from the air – but it was worth it just to wake him up (it is 4:42am in the UK at the moment) and I should have read the instructions I guess!
On the test it shows you your ISP which in this case seems to be AT&T for one test and KSFiberNet, Kansas for the other although it seems to give a choice and the distances (see screen capture on right) which is interesting at nearly 500mph.
“…I am keen to see when [this service] it will be installed on European services”
This technology may have been around for a while in the US but I am keen to see when it will be installed on European services. It is great that we have Wi-Fi on the tube at major stations and the Wi-Fi on a number of train lines, while usually fairly ropey it does a job. But with free (VoIP and video capable) wireless across most of Calgary airport and now Wi-Fi on the flight down to San Francisco I think North America is certainly a pace ahead of what we currently get in the UK or mainland Europe.
I am due to be on the IT Directors Forum on board the Cruise Ship Arcadia in a few weeks’ time. We will be moored just outside St Peter Port on Guernsey and I know from the last six years’ experience that there will be limited mobile signal and very little internet access on board while moored and none at all while travelling. Any internet access we do get certainly won’t cost $8.95 for three hours!
But back to the positive experience that is this journey!
My flight this evening is only half full. I am in seat 19a of 24 rows (I know it doesn’t add up but there are fewer seats in the First Class section at the front. As I look down the length of the plane there seems to be a 50:50 split, half the people are in couples and chatting or snoozing, the other half, like me are tapping away on their laptops/ultrabooks or iPads. We are all typing away happy in the knowledge that we won’t have to dive off the flight and look for the first place with a power socket and a Wi-Fi connection – we will just send from here.
As for the rest of the detail of the flight. I have two seats to myself, I have a weak but palatable American beer on the go, a travel sized packet of Pringles to stave off the hunger until I reach my destination and a connection to the internet. There is just enough time to send this blog, email my receipts to my PA, catch up on some emails, check the updated weather forecast for the morning and prepare for landing while bracing myself for a night out in San Francisco. It really is how travel ought to be in the today’s technological world! Well done United Airlines!
UPDATE: I have just had breakfast with the IT Director of Cisco Meraki, he tells me that they had a senior exec on a United Airways flight last week with a laptop issue. They got remote access onto her machine at 30,000ft and 500mph and resolved the issue – proof that everything they do in San Francisco is cooler!
Thank you Mr Hodges. That is a fitting following up to three articles about the shortfall in broadband services in the UK. It seems strange that mid-flight passengers in the US are enjoying a better broadband experience than many areas of the UK.
To answer Mr Hodges question regarding the lack of service below 10,000 feet. I suspect this is due to the fact that service has been engineered to operate above 10,000 feet. The design is most likely depending on a number of upward pointing antennas. To reduce the operational height would require more antennas or a wider beam antennas.
The major benefit of the system is there is unlikely to be much in the way of the ground mounted antenna and the aircraft antenna, guaranteeing a reasonably clear signal, albeit over a long distance.
