billatq

I noticed on my last flight (AS21) that only one of the Gogo access points seemed to be working on my flight and that made it particularly bad. The FA said that they were aware of the problem, but couldn't get it fixed prior to leaving back for Seattle.

UpstateDave

How did you know that was the issue? Anything to look at for before you buy a pass to know it'll be bad?

HomerJay

Used gogo on 4/13 VX flight IAD-LAX, and it was terribly slow, eventually to the point of being useless. Didn't used to be bad at all on VX. Didn't even bother with it on the redeye back the next week.

Brianblanco

I stopped bothering with gogo years ago. Have never been able to connect/replicate in outlook. Pathetic service.

beaver

I've had two cross country flights this week on 738s and the service actually worked "fine." Never great, but certainly doable for email and web pages, which matches my level of expectation for this type of technology. Like others, I'm looking forward to the newer equipment and better service.

In my experience another variable is flight level. The service seems to work better from 30,000' to 36,000'. Above fl360 and service seems to be spottier. I wonder which elevation GoGo points their antennas at.

Madone59

I used GoGo twice last week and thought the speed was OK. I was only surfing on my phone through the free T-Mobile hour but I was satisfied.

vgc

Just completed a cross country flight this morning and GoGo was no slower than usual.

billatq

At least on my mac, you can open up wireless diagnostics and see how many access points you can see. A simpler solution would be to say that you're going to download the gogo media app and test to see how well it's actually working during your free 15 minutes of wifi. I'm using the $5 T-Mobile add-on to get access, so I'll always try to use it.

MissJ

Couldn't even get on it last night. It was so slow. I had a day pass to use and couldn't even get to my account screen to apply it. Figured that if it was going to be that bad, why even use a pass.

jackal

I'm a little skeptical of that. There are multiple access points on the aircraft, and at least last time I checked, they were running 802.11n. Even divided up between 180 people, the on-board system should be able to handle that. I haven't experienced any issues with the on-board streaming entertainment stuttering, so I don't think it's wifi congestion.

My experience and the experiences of a few friends would seem to confirm that. It's very throttled, though--to the tune of something on par with 56kbps per user (although iMessages and Facebook messages and things all seem to go through pretty quickly, so those must be exempt from the rate limiting). Although 180 people connecting to the Internet at 56kbps (dial-up modem) speeds does equate to 10mbps, which is more than the typical throughput of a Gogo ATG connection, so maybe this is indeed the root of the issue.

I think this is the issue. I've had issues on some recent AS flights but not all, and I would hazard an educated guess that the issues (the ones bad enough to warrant me Tweeting obscenities at Gogo, anyway) are all on the aircraft that haven't been upgraded to ATG-4.

dmodemd

I use GoGo on AS all the time. To keep the price reasonable, I buy a one hour pass in advance for $7 from GoGo's web site. It's much cheaper to buy passes in advance. In one hour I can get through my emails or contact people at work.

Performance is poor but good enough to get email or do some web browsing. Some flights are better than others. The times I have seen it out entirely have been on the older planes.

rustykettel

It's quite possible that there's at least one wireless client connected that's 802.11g or perhaps even 802.11b. That can slow things a little bit and vary from flight to flight.

mczlaw

Brand new AS/Gogo interface today on AS 30, BOS-PDX. Brought optimistic thoughts of maybe trial of new tech.....But no. Started reasonably fast, then bogged down and down. Couldn't send text only email. Blecch!

But nice new interface. Very calming