FlyFi Performance
 

I thought I was doing the right thing by resurrecting a related thread for my question, but it appears now that the question wasn't clearly understood, and I'm concerned that the thread won't be revisited and therefore my clarification will remain unseen.

I'm trying to find out whether the advertised streaming of Amazon media via FlyFi performs well, with a minimum of stutter/rebuffering and good resolution. The flight's tonight (27 Feb 2016) and I need to start downloading now if performance is going to suck. I'd appreciate any experiences that can be shared.

If the equipment makes a difference, it's an A320. I don't know how (or even if it's possible) to obtain the tail number at this point.

I have no heard any complaints from any customers about the Amazon Service. I saw several people taking advantage of the Amazon Streaming Service last night. I think you will be happy with the performance.

Thank you, JetBlueFA!

Yes, in general I've found FlyFi very reliable and the speeds are VASTLY superior to all other airlines WiFi--it's not even close!

Other airlines WiFi = 0.1-0.3mb GoGo connection (3/mb connection shared between everyone on plane)
JetBlue FlyFi WiFi = 12-15mb per user (~100/mb connection for entire plane)

I had no issues using it BOS to LAS on Saturday. Streaming quality and surfing was completely normal using the "free" option. My wife did experience problems getting her iPad connected, but disabling and re-enabling her wifi adapter fixed it.

I completely understood your question. :p

My flight yesterday had fly-fi and speed was decent but the ping was bad. Around 700-800 ping. Overall for the free version I enjoyed it considering last time I flew wifi on planes was a pipe dream and considering the limitations I understood how it can be.

That will always be the downside of satellite-based internet service. It's physically impossible to bounce a signal off a satellite and have it travel back to Earth for less than ~600ms, because of the distance traveled.

I do appreciate that you took the time to answer, but the question was not "how does it work," it was "how well does it work." You provided instructions, not an assessment.

In my experience, Jetblue's FlyFi is vastly superior to Gogo and the system WN uses

I thought the "do whatever you want" part was sufficient to cover that aspect of things. :-:

Again, not a response that provides insight into the quality of the service, and I think the word "well" pretty clearly indicates what I was looking for.

Adding some qualifications to my criteria gave me the type of response I was expecting. In the future I'll be sure to spell things out.

Peace.

Figured I should at least follow up with my personal experience from Sunday afternoon/evening (flight 178 LAS->BOS).

Using the free option on an OG iPad Air, the Amazon Video app was a bit slow to display thumbnails, and initial buffering took a few seconds longer than on my home network. Once buffered, though, performance was very good with only very rare freezing/stuttering.

My Hulu experience wasn't quite as good, with longer times to display available selections and, at least initially for each selection, lower video quality and more frequent (albeit still rare) freezes/stuttering. It's obvious that there's some bandwidth management going on for services other than Amazon. Hulu content was still very watchable, though.

My SO had a bit of difficulty in getting her iPad 2 connected, but I'm inclined to think it was simply that she's less technically inclined and assumed that the connection was established as soon as the "Free" option was selected (it's not, there's one more button to click). Once that was resolved, she used Amazon with no further issues.

If my immediate seating area (rows 11-13) were representative of the the rest of the aircraft, I'd estimate that 20-25% of the passengers were using the service. I don't know how that compares to utilization across all flights, but it appears there's bandwidth to spare.

The overall experience was far superior to any I've had with GoGo. I'm looking forward to having this available on the E190s, since most of my travel on B6 is regional.

Nice job, JetBlue!