Originally Posted by
mamb0
Hmm, no, actually not. With antenna diversity the system is designed to work at operational speeds of commercial aviation. The latency is high because of the signal travel between plane, satellite and ground station. Also an error correction protocol might add to the latency. But you should have continuous service.
Regarding antenna diversity, switching between the available antenna-signals must be synced with the updating of the reference signal phase in order not to endager the signal detection from corruption by the transient signal-phase in the moment of switching.
The greater the distance between phase updatings (which is proportional with speed, so switching has to be more frequent), leads to significant phase deviations for both antenna signals, therefore an error free data transmission can not be expected from the diversity system.
So, although the connectivity will be continuous, TCP session might time out occasionally which would led to experience to spotty service.
Antenna diversity works great for certain applications, but I don't believe it works well for broadband experience on planes, when users compare terrestrial broadband with broadband on plane.
I would be surprised if planes would have better characteristics then 1Mbps down/256k up with up to 900msec one way latency.