[For my updated review of the Gogo service, click here.]
Last week, I took a cross-country Delta flight on a Boeing 757 that was equipped with Gogo In-flight Wi-Fi Internet. Gogo and Delta are running a promotion through December 31, 2009 whereby first-time users can try the service for free. I thought that this would be a good opportunity to test the service on my iPhone 3GS, so I followed the simple instructions on the card in my seatback pocket, entered "deltatrygogo" in the promo code blank when I got to the payment page, and within a minute I was on the Internet, which I used throughout my four hour flight. The service worked great and I strongly recommend using Gogo if you want to have Internet access on your iPhone while you are flying.
The Gogo service is currently available on select domestic flights on Delta, United and American Airlines. AirTran and Virgin America offer the service on all of their flights. US Airways announced that it will add the service in 2010.
Access is easy. Once your plane reaches 10,000 feet and you are told that you can use electronic devices, go to Settings and keep your iPhone in Airplane Mode but turn on Wi-Fi. You will see gogoinflight as an available network. Select it, and in just a few moments a screen will pop up for you to log on. (If it doesn't, just go to Safari and try to access any website.) Follow the prompts to sign up, choose a plan (or use the promotional code noted above), and then you will see this screen telling you that you are connected:
At that point, you can use your iPhone to access the Internet to do just about anything you want. Of course, you will want to read and send e-mails, and that works great. Using Safari to access websites was also very fast. Twitter and Facebook worked great, as did my RSS reader app, NetNewsWire.
The terms of service prohibit you from using VOIP to make phone calls using the Gogo service. I briefly contemplated launching the Skype app just to see if it worked notwithstanding the terms of service, but then quickly decided against it. The last thing I want is to be surrounded by people yakking on the phone on an airplane, so I certainly didn't want to start any trends. But you can easily interact with people on the ground by sending e-mail back and forth or by using instant messaging. If your company supports VPN for extra security, VPN does work fine with Gogo.
One concern that I had was speed. After all, we are talking about using the Internet at 30,000 feet. But to my surprise, the speed was quite reasonable. Gogo says that the speed varies depending on the number of people on the flight using the service. I ran two speed test apps, at different points on the flight, and both of them consistently showed the speed as around 800 to 900 Kbps for download and almost 200 Kbps upload. For example, here is the results screen from one of those apps:
That is not even close to the Wi-Fi speeds that I normally get on my iPhone (I get around 7000 Kbps down and about 800 Kpbs up on my home Wi-Fi), but it is very similar to what I typically see on AT&T's 3G network. Indeed, my subjective opinion of the Gogo service was that it felt as fast as a good 3G connection, which is plenty fast for most of what you want to do with an iPhone on a plane.
For example, I was able to download an app from the App Store quickly and easily. I could download music and podcasts from iTunes, but it took a while to do so, depending upon the length (for example, around 10 minutes for one podcast). YouTube worked fine.
Both as a test, and as a source of entertainment, I decided to access the NBC mobile website and watch some sitcoms I had missed last Thursday night (30 Rock, The Office and Parks and Recreation). To do this, you go to m.nbc.com on your iPhone. Click on the "video" tab and choose "full episodes." There are plenty of choices, around 17 shows that are currently on the air, and 11 classic shows (currently: The A-Team, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Battlestar Galactica (the original series), Buck Rogers, Charles in Charge, Emergency, Knight Rider (the original series), Magnum P.I., Miami Vice, Quantum Leap and Simon & Simon). Each show is broken into a few segments of up to around ten minutes. When one segment ends the next segment starts to load.
By default, the iPhone waits until it has loaded enough of the segment so that it can play the video through to the end without pausing before it starts to play. Sometimes I found that the segment would start in just a few seconds. Other times, it would take a few minutes to buffer enough video, so I used that time to browse a magazine. Either way, before long, I was watching the episode and the quality was excellent. I had loaded my iPhone with video content before my flight, but it was so nice to watch something new that had aired so recently that I didn't even bother with most of what I had loaded on my iPhone. And as an added bonus, no commercials—although I'm sure NBC will include them at some point.
I have seen reports that Gogo uses traffic shaping to share the bandwidth on the plane, so if you are trying to do something that doesn't use a lot of bandwidth, like check e-mail or even load web pages, your service will be given priority. For high bandwidth uses like streaming video, you will be given a lower priority so that you don't hog all of the bandwidth that your neighbors are trying to use. This seems fair to me and probably explains some of the reasons that I had some delays when I was streaming television episodes.
So how much does Wi-Fi on your plane cost? If you haven't tried Gogo before and you fly Delta, you can use it once for free by using the promotional information I noted above. [UPDATE 10/21/09: Google and Virgin America are also offering free Wi-Fi on every Virgin America flight from November 10, 2009 through January 15, 2010.] Otherwise, there are several cost plans. For a short flight of 90 minutes or less, the cost is $5.95. For any flight of more than 90 minutes, it costs $7.95 for a mobile device like an iPhone. The iPhone price is cheaper than what you would pay on a laptop: $9.95 for a flight of 90 minutes to three hours and $12.95 for a flight of more than three hours. You can also pay $12.95 for 24-hour access on multiple flights or $49.99 for a month of access.
Is the service worth it? I think so. On a short flight of 90 minutes or less, I probably won't have enough need for the Internet to spend $6 for it, but it is nice to know that it is there. For a longer flight, $8 seems reasonable to be able to keep up with your office and be productive, and may also be worthwhile just to entertain yourself on the Internet. Indeed, airports have already conditioned us to paying crazy high prices for food and bottled water, and you'll probably get more out of the Gogo service than you did from the pre-flight Starbucks coffee that wasn't much less than $8.
