Review of in-flight Wi-Fi from a first-timer

I am here

By John Banta

I’m off to visit my wifeand in-laws in Wilmington, NC for the July 4th weekend and decided to try something new.

I’m writing this post from 30,000 feet aboard Delta Air Lines flight 1935 en route to Atlanta and must say, I am pretty impressed with the in-flight Internet access I am just now checking out for the first time.

After a quick registration process on a sign-up page and charging $9.95 to my credit card, I am now online for the duration of the flight.

As far as the service, it has worked very well for me. Since shortly after takeoff, I have successfully:

• checked work email,
• checked the flight status to grab the image you see here,
• sent an SMS message to my wife using the very cool Google Voice, and
• written this post – all without any issues.

For the business traveler, this seems like a definite plus to keep up with the office while between airports.

For leisure travelers, this service may seem a bit pricey, especially if you’re traveling on a multi-leg itinerary as you would need to pay the $9.95 for each flight, or buy a $49 package for 30 days (which would seem to pay off if you have a few trips coming up, all on the same Wi-Fi-enabled carrier.)

To test out the download speeds, I logged into iTunes and bought the new Killers album and was quite pleased with the time needed to complete the download — it was pretty snappy and not that much slower than a broadband connection you might have at home. (For the technical folks, I was getting approximately 200kb/second).

Upload speed was noticeably slower as it took nearly a minute to upload the map (about 800k).  For most Wi-Fi fliers I wouldn’t expect this to be an issue though unless you’re uploading photos from your trip on the flight home, which I don’t think I would recommend.

Well, we’re nearing Atlanta so I need to go but Happy Travels.

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