Virgin America hosted a group of Web celebrities aboard a special demonstration flight last weekend to show off its inflight Wi-Fi Internet access service. It’s an astonishing change: instead of boarding a flight that automatically cuts you off for hours from all communications (except for those equipped with outrageously expensive inflight voice phones), you now have full, broadband Internet connectivity, even a VPN link to your corporate network. Your plane seat just became your office desk chair. [So do you crave airborne Internet? Take our poll.]
Every jet in the Virgin U.S. fleet will be outfitted with a Wi-Fi access point and a EV-DO radio that links up with a web of 92 base stations spanning the U.S., built and run by network provider Aircell. In effect, the jet is a Wi-Fi hot spot with a cellular backhaul connection to a ground point of prescence. The service, dubbed GoGo, will deliver an uplink of 3.1Mbps and a downlink of 1.8Mbps, and possibly more if Aircell implements data compression techniques. The demo flight, a round trip from and to San Francisco with over 100 invited guests showed the service worked flawlessly and most of all fast, according to one of them, Tim Moynihan, a reporter with our sister news site PC World. He’s got a brief report online, along with a video created inflight with PC World Media Specialist Chris Manners. The service remained fast even with nearly every passenger online. GoGo won’t be free: There’s a $10 charge for flights lasting three hours or less, jumping to $13 for longer flights. Moynihan notes that’s on par with hotel Wi-Fi charges, and he says he found GoGo both faster and more reliable than the typical hotel service. And it’s certainly better than the “free” Wi-Fi I suffered with on my most recent trip to Orlando. iPass subscribers, many of them business users who travel often, will get GoGo access at least initially as part of their enterprise service bundle with the hotspot aggregator, so they won’t have to pay extra. American is offering it on some flights, Delta will be rolling out GoGo this fall, and a bunch of others including Continental, JetBlue, and Soutwest are testing it. It almost makes being treated like cattle worthwhile. As long as your seatmate doesn’t log into a video porn site at 37,000 feet.
