Originally Posted by
FlyerJ
Interesting explanation aerobod — thanks! I fully admit I’m not a tech-savy person (beyond knowing how to connect to inflight wifi, I have no clue how it works!).
Im intrigued ... Air Canada now claims that they have “streaming” speed wifi on their wide body fleet, fast enough to support streaming video, and it works internationally. My understanding is that they use Gogo. How do they make that work?
With WestJet, my challenge is that their wifi is almost always an awful user experience to connect, and then an unreliable product once connected. Your tech explanation is helpful, but doesn’t change the issue that they’re selling something that doesn’t work all that well.
Air Canada has implemented Gogo 2Ku (satelite) on it's widebodies, as opposed to Gogo ATG (cellular) that is used on the Delta and United narrowbody fleet and some of the AC narrowbodies. Gogo 2Ku uses many of the same satellites as Panasonic Ku used by WestJet. To a given aircraft, the streaming capability is limited by the satellite receiver. Most of the WestJet receivers should have been upgraded to the 100Mbps+ units (typically up to 400Mbps for v3 units compared with the initial 20Mbps v1 units) that are similar to what Air Canada is or has installed to use the latest Inmarsat satellites.
The limit on streaming will be more based on cost, as most trans-oceanic satellites will cost about USD$0.10 to USD$0.20 per megabyte of transfer, or about USD$150 to stream a 1GB movie.