nsx

I often have to clear Safari cookies (not a simple process) to get the wifi login to work.

ctuttle

My experience is IF you are on one of the new planes, or one of the planes with the new Wifi you will be amazed, or at least I was. Recently was on a flight where the FA told me I was on a plane that had been put into service a week ago. Plane was beautiful (say this because am on a lot of OLD planes to low density cities, and live in one of those miserable low density cities). Wifi was fantastic, did a speedtest and it was 46 Mbps, which is faster than a LOT of hotels and airports. Evidently the marketing about the bandwidth is true, and they didn't appear to be doing any data shaping or slowing down. I did do a download to verify and it wasn't slowed down. Also no issues with using the corporate VPN.

Wasn't a data hog and didn't exploit it, but should you get on a plane with the new wifi it is terrific, and they appear to have plenty of bandwidth for the whole plane. Well worth the money, and worth the loyalty to get the upper tier of Rapid Rewards for the free Wifi. More than likely if you are on a 737-800 or MAX you will see the faster Wifi. In the last month on at least a dozen flights no wifi not working on the flights and have been on some of the older smaller 737s out here in the flyover area. So my anecdodal experience is they have their act together with their Wifi. Can safely say it will be better than what you have to deal with on AA, as your expectations should be low there.

Irazabul

So I just got back from a SWA flight. My Samsung did not work, but when I logged on from my wife's Ipad, it worked fine. I can now confirm that it is my Samsung phone.

I tried numerouse methods - I know it should be on airplane mode for it to work for me (like in the past). I tried clearing memory and cache on both chrome and southwest app. Still did not work. Also tried to forget network and re-establish. It has to be some cookie or something. I read somewhere to clear the HSTS or turn private DNS off, which I will try next flight.

In the past, when it worked for me, I would get the wifi waves bar and it would say connected (even before internet connected) but now I get the waves and an exclamation point.

In all instances, movies and TV work fine tho.

kennycrudup

The problem with that is I don't own anything but Samsung products and have no problems getting online aboard- when the WiFi is working (and can get outside the plane, which are two separate events).

(That being said, make sure your WiFi setting "Automatically switch to Mobile Data" has an exception for "SouthwestWiFI", otherwise if you're not in Airplane Mode until you authenticate it won't let you keep the WiFi connection.)

boycruz

Does wi-fi work from hawaii to west coast?

dmbolp

It's supposed to

dlaue

Yes, and it seems slightly more reliable than the Wi-Fi over the continent.
The only time it does not work, in my experience (about 2 round trips/year - more during the pandemic) is when the aircraft, itself, has broken Wi-Fi.

pinniped

4 flights in the past two weeks. Only one had working Wifi. On two of them the FA announced it before departure and told people not to pay for it.

daves1243fly

My experence is that it's technically working 90 % of the time, but actual connectivity is very intermittent. My theory is that the free video sucks up the bandwidth available for paying users. Attempting to use a VPN seems to make it even worse.

kennycrudup

I'm almost certain those are delivered via two separate methods (the is TV via DIsh similar to how you get it at home and is one-way, but the Internet is two-way and requires more of an SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) and a better view of the sats to be usable).

... that being said, I'm noticing the -800s and Maxes tend to fly, but the 700s and regular birds tend to suck; not sure if that's due to just older equipment or not.

Yeah, 'cause of the huge packet loss- TCP-based VPNs like OpenVPN can sometimes be usable if the bandwidth is high (so packet loss is good) but a UDP one like Wireguard is just lost in the weeds at any time :|

flg8rmatt

With the VPN thing, I have found I cannot even connect to the WiFi if my VPN is active. Once I turn that off, it works just fine. Same behavior on United, but once the WiFi connection was established, I could turn my VPN back on. I believe with WN, and maybe DL, the VPN must remain off to work.

m907

I was on a 30% full MAX8 with the Viasat system. A speed test showed 87 Mbps downloads, which was impressive, but webpages were still relatively slow to load. The ping was over 800 ms so maybe that's why.

LegalTender

You try the power ports?

m907

There weren't any on the plane.

jmw

Late response, but have you tried forgetting the SouthwestWiFi network every time you land and turn off airplane mode? That's much simpler. There is also a Wifi portal login link on recent versions of iOS but I've stuck with forgetting networks as standard operating procedure on most public wifi.