Originally Posted by
aerobod
The reason you see better performance on your phone vs PC on WestJet is due to the differences between satellite based Internet and air-to-ground cellular Internet. Panasonic Aero uses only geostationary satellites to give worldwide coverage, Gogo uses ATG cellular to cover just the continental US and a small part of Canada.
Satellite Internet has a latency around 700ms, ATG about 100ms, so synchronous packet flows will turnaround about 7 times slower due to the speed of light delay. The US is in a unique position in the world in having ATG coverage at very low cost, but the rest of the world is generally only covered by satellite. In the future low-earth satellite mesh systems will provide similar or better performance to ATG, but it will take an aircraft IFEC antenna and receiver refit at the cost of about $300K per aircraft for compatibility.
Delta and United use ATG on most of their narrow body fleet due to having about 80% coverage where they fly them, WestJet would only have about 30% coverage with ATG for their jet fleet routes. United and Emirates uses Panasonic Aero for their widebody fleets.
Couple of observations:
1) Commercially operating LEO constellations (SpaceX, OneWeb) are 3-4 years away. Forget the hype, there are significant technical difficulties in getting mobility working effectively for LEO megaconstellations. And that's without addressing the need to replace that $300k of onboard kit to displace an incumbent GEO operator.
2) ATG is a big piece in the US through GoGo. Europe is up and coming through the European Aviation Network (EAN) from Inmarsat/Deutsch Telecom. I rather suspect that Satellite will displace ATG in North America in the near term but we'll see.
Originally Posted by
aerobod
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.
Air Canada has GoGo 2Ku on widebodies. It ain't bad for general browsing and working, in my experience. I've not tried streaming. It's been a while but my WJ Gogo 2KU was sort of comparable experience.
I don't believe AC is using Inmarsat.
The challenge for any Satellite connectivity to an aircraft is providing a big enough pipe. Very High Throughput Satellites (VHTS) are coming that will improve the ability to do this, but currently, performance is really predicated on the fact that only a fraction of the 300 or so people on a widebody actually plan to use the internet at the same time. Consumer pricing is engineered to make that unlikely - i.e. its too expensive for the masses. When capacity increases then I expect pricing to fall.