So, GoGo is officially a joke at this point, right?
 

Has anyone actually found the service usable in the past few months?

I had a modem for my Commodore 64 in 1987 that was faster than Gogo. It just took 44 seconds to fully load the Google home page.

This is a disgrace...

Yes, it has been abysmal for a long time.

I also discovered that if you consume more than about 40 megabytes in one hour, your usage is deemed "abnormally high" and your connection is throttled.

Are too many people watching the free movies?

I didn't think the movies were an issue as they are stored on board the aircraft.

I've complained to them multiple times and all I get from them is that I'm on a flight that has unusually high usage at the moment then they throw me a refund/credit. It feels like to me that either I have the best luck at picking unusually high GoGo usage flights or all flights have unusually high usage. If it's the former I need to buy a lotto ticket.

These days, how can you tell the difference? ;)

David

Correct, the TV shows and movies are stored and streamed from the aircraft and should have minimal impact on Internet performance.

Are there separate wireless networks onboard for people who are watching all the streaming stuff and gogo? I've only seen one SSID so I thought it was all on the same wireless network. If that's the case, then a lot of local traffic could impact performance. Perhaps Delta needs to put two networks on the plane. Put all the streaming stuff on a hardwored network or something.

The only thing that the go-go is good for now a days is the in-flight texting on T-Mobile.

One SSID doesn't mean one Access Point (AP). The gogoinflight SSID is overlaid on all of their APs (which is best practice). I have noticed a second network that's not broadcasting its SSID but it's also protected with a WPA2 key. I suspect this one is used for the F/A's terminals.

I did some wifi sniffing on a recent 738 flight and saw at least 6 APs. I highly doubt the streaming traffic from the planes server is affecting internet speeds. If it is, it should be readily apparent to DL/gogo and hopefully they'll fix it.

The bigger issue is that gogo's backbone hasn't been upgraded in 5+ years. It uses an EVDO connection to ground which is at least one generation behind LTE. During that time, more and more peeps have started using gogo. More demand, same supply = slower internets.

I quit using gogo years ago. For a while afterward I would just hack my way around the captive portal to use the internet, but now I don't even bother. It's too unusable (and the hack was unstable). I can pound through emails in my inbox or watch a movie or whatever to pass the time.

It'd take quite a few people streaming to have an impact. 802.11n networks will generally provide 100Mbps+ bandwidth which is an order of magnitude greater than the downlink speed. You don't need more SSID's to scale a wireless network, just more radios on different frequencies. I'll try to remember to do a wifi survey on my next flight to see if there are multiple radios installed.

That depends on how one defines backbone in this context. Air-to-ground capacity has increased with ATG-4 installations, of which the DL_Cust_Experience employee has spoken. Hard to say what fraction of DL's wifi aircraft have been upgrade to ATG-4.

http://concourse.gogoair.com/technology/gogo-atg-4-work

There are.

That's an interesting read. Also interesting that they don't mention throughput. :) Their graphic shows 9.8Mbps, that's still not very much bandwidth for dozens of users. I believe I read somewhere else that they're only getting like 3-4Mbps from EVDO.

I would wager to say since that many of DL's planes haven't been updated yet.

Even then I wondered on aircraft with lots of pax how quickly you would overload the system.
Basically with 2.4 you've got 3 channels, 1, 6, and 11. If you say 100 Mbps real throughput on 802.11n (which is optimistic) that's 300Mbps. That is super optimistic, with so many clients, real bandwidth is probably 150Mbps?

If each video stream is 2Mbps, that's 70 video streams with 10Mbps left over for internet. If one day they start streaming HD, that could easily be 5-10Mbps/stream, then you're going to need 5Ghz pretty quick.

Hmmm ---

Maybe we can start a movement to call it NoGo. Or SloGo.