Verizon Ellipsis Jetpack hijacks Gogo Inflight, we can't connect to Delta Studio
 

I was on DL966 MIA-LGA today and it took me over a half hour for me to connect to GoGo because there were 2 Verizon Ellipsis Jetpacks stealing the GoGo bandwidth and we could not connect with the Delta Studio. Others could not connect at all and simply gave up. There were several people complaining to the FA's and finally they made an announcement asking whoever had these devices to turn them off. One of the FA's mentioned to me that they couldn't even connect with their credit card scanners because of this interference.

I noticed a couple of these on my flights this week and was wondering if they were being used in someway to get WiFi without have to go through GoGo.

Yes and they are stealing the bandwidth from Gogo so many have issues connecting.

Well, one would think this would get DL's attention. :D

I agree, there were 2 doing this on my flight and people were pissed! :mad:

How do the jetpacks steal all the Gogo bandwidth? I thought jetpacks are for creating a wireless network using cell signal. How do they interfere with gogo?

Most likely the Jetpacks were set to use the same channel as GoGo. Can cause prpblems with bandwidth/connection. Other issue is if the device has a malfunction. In that case it can prevent others from even seeing other wifi networks and even if see it, prevent a connection to the network.

Jetpack should've been turned off. It's not approved device for use in flight and it's not going to be connected anyway.

Are you sure about that last statement? The FA I spoke to said that she had seen them being used on many flights lately, that they were causing major issues for other passengers trying to connect to Gogo and it would be a major coincidence that all of these people would have their jetpacks powered on if they weren't using them.

They may be on, but shouldn't be connecting to a network.

They might pick it up, however I'm betting most get left on by accident.

One maybe, two maybe not. Either way they are connecting to the same server as Gogo and robbing us of bandwidth.

Can Verizon Ellipsis Jetpacks bypass Gogo Inflight?
 

On a DL flight yesterday, 2 people were using Verizon Ellipsis Jetpacks and as a result a large number of passengers could not connect to Gogo as these Jetpacks were stealing the bandwidth. In fact the FA's could not even process payments on their credit card scanners. My question is whether these Ellipsis Jetpacks can actually be used to connect to the onboard server and by doing so allow people to circumvent having to pay for Gogo?

I have never seen or used a Jetpack device but my understanding is they receive Verizon 4G LTE spectrum and rebroadcast Wi-Fi. Someone please explain how this would interfere with GoGo’s separate wi-fi network because I am not buying it. And don’t say because a flight attendant said so. I say GoGo is just being GoGo.

Did anyone report this to GoGo?

A couple of different ways. First, the JetPacks are competing for LTE bandwidth. But most likely the interference was due to the JetPacks using WiFi channels too close to or even overlapping with the GoGo channels.

The FA's told me that this has been reported by them many times to DL. IMO, it is DL's obligation to deal with Gogo and correct this issue.

The Jetpack device is meant to create a Wifi hotspot using a 4G data signal.

There is no 4G or any cellular signal available in flight. So it would not be of any use during cruise.

The only logical explanation I can see is that the devices are left on by accident, can’t connect to cellular data but still emit a wifi signal in the same frequency/channel as the Gogo onboard wifi network.

But even that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me because :

1. There wouldn’t be any data transfer on the “rogue” network, so bandwidth crowding is unlikely
2. Since there is no data, it’s useless for the owner of the jetpack
3. How can a tiny battery-powered wifi radio override a multi-antenna, calibrated system with proper coverage throughout the cabin is beyond me

My guess is there was something else wrong with the Gogo service on those flights and little to actually do with the Jetpacks…

Competing against what? Gogo doesn't use LTE AFAIK.

This makes the most sense, but see my post above.

I could be wrong, but I don't see how a jetpack would interfere with gogo. I've tried to use my jetpack in areas with weak service before and they are totally useless if there's not at least two bars of LTE. Most likely, people who were using one instead of crappy public Wi-Fi in the terminal just forgot to turn it off. They aren't taking bandwith from gogo because they dont connect to other networks. As other have said, even if they're on a similar frequency, they're not doing anything since they're out of LTE range.

Then why would the FA's say that they could not connect with their credit card scanning devices?

That is incorrect. While domestic Gogo service has been provided by networks broadcast from the ground like a commercial LTE network, these broadcasts have used Gogo's own networks, not Verizon Wireless'. Not only is there no competition for LTE bandwidth, LTE networks don't come into play at all here.

Additionally, while I admit I haven't followed the installation of some of Gogo's newer technologies on DL's aircraft utilized on domestic routes, if they're no longer using Air-to-Ground systems (and using the satellite-based ones instead), then the notion that there is a competition for LTE bandwidth is even further from the truth.

This is correct, albeit still improbable. I've seen Jetpack-broadcasted networks on my DL flights before and successfully used Gogo without any issues. While it is 100% possible for there to be an interference issue of sufficient significance to bring Gogo service to its knees, based on my anecdotal experience with Gogo, I feel that it's much more likely that the Gogo system onboard was having its own unrelated issues. Even the simplest of consumer-grade network routers is not going to be overwhelmed by a pair of mobile broadband hotspots. Unless one of the hotspots had a serious malfunction, they should not be able to effectively disable commercial-grade networking equipment, even considering how relatively basic a Gogo setup is.

Because they probably couldn't. But again, it's likely that it was because the Gogo system was having its own issues, and either:

1.) The FA's didn't know anything about the technology and simply assumed that the Jetpacks were the issue, or
2.) Understood the technology well enough to know that it was likely an issue with the Gogo system itself, but wanted to try to redirect the blame from themselves/Delta/Gogo and get passengers off their backs.

I don't know how they set up the card scanners on board but I would think they wouldn't be reliant on the notoriously unreliable gogo Wi-Fi. Certainly there was an issue with the network on board, I'm just skeptical that a cellular device would be the cause. I've seen plenty of pax blatantly ignore the instructions to put their phone on airplane mode and that doesn't seem to cause issues with the credit cards.

As surprising as it may be, I do believe they do use the Gogo system. Besides that, I'm not sure what else they would have to use, unless they did not attempt to authorize any purchases until after the flight. I've never used a credit card on a flight for anything, but based on what OP said about the FA's indicating they couldn't connect, it doesn't sound like that's the case.

ARINC?

That's... not how jetpacks work.

Also, there's no evidence that the jetpacks are all using the same channel as the gogo access point. It's a plausible theory but even if they are it should not cause total inability to connect.

As an engineer who deals with Wi-Fi all the time, it’s highly unlikely the mobile hotspots were the cause of the problem.

For one, there are typically 3+ Gogo access points on each aircraft, so the hotspots (with their relatively small antenna) would easily be overpowered by the Gogo APs... and if only two mobile hotspots were present on the plane, at least one of the zones should have been fully unaffected.

Furthermore, I believe the three APs each use unique channels (1,6,11) - so that further reduces the likelihood of WiFi interference. And even if everything was on the same channel, WiFi is designed to work anyway - otherwise apartment dwellers would never have working Internet. (I can see 35+ APs from my condo, for example.)

For two, my understanding is that Delta Studio content is served up from an onboard server. No downlink to the ground is involved, so since it wasn’t working on OP’s flight we can entirely eliminate cellular service as a variable.

What really likely happened here is that the Gogo system was on the fritz of its own volition, and the FAs only source of troubleshooting was other things they saw advertised in the WiFi settings on their phone. That registered as something they thought might be a problem, so they made an announcement asking people to turn them off.

Remember, there’s nothing special about a mobile hotspot - it’s just the guts of a cheap smart phone in a box with a big battery and some dedicated software. They should definitely be in flight mode to prevent them from searching for cell network signal at high power, just like a phone should, but that wouldn’t cause WiFi issues or problems with Delta Studio, so we can eliminate that as a cause of OP’s issues.

On nearly every flight I’ve taken, somebody has forgotten to turn off their mobile hotspot - and it never causes problems with Gogo. It’s unfortunate that OP’s flight was having issues, and I’m sure the FAs were trying to troubleshoot in good faith, but it’s extremely unlikely this was an interference issue.

Delta was an early adopter of consumer phone tech for card readers and in flight info systems for flight attendants. (IIRC, it was part of a deal with Microsoft, AT&T, and Nokia to use Windows Phones at first.). My understanding is that because Delta was one of the only airlines to have fleet wide Gogo Internet, they decided to bet on ordinary WiFi connectivity.

I assume they have a fallback plan of some sort - either offline card swipes with paying the requisite higher merchant fee, or simply comping people onboard purchases when the tech isn’t working.

I now understand when real lawyers call people out for playing armchair lawyer.

Let's just say there is a solid amount of misinformation in this thread and BenA's post sums things up pretty well.

I could also not connect to Gogo Wifi on both CRJ jets and it kept saying obtaining IP address on my Android Cellphone and would not bring me to the TMobile Gogo Login Page.

It would be easy for Gogo to prioritize Delta corporate traffic (eg: credit card transactions) over all passenger traffic. The bottleneck on these flights isn't the wifi connectivity within the plane, it's plane-to-ground, and Gogo can fully manage that traffic. And as the amount of data is negligible, doing so wouldn't have a meaningful impact on anyone else's experience.

I don’t think this is the reason. I’ve seen various Wi-Fi devices on the plane at times and GoGo worked fine. The Elipsis device would connect to Verizon on the ground not to the GoGo WiFi. The reason you saw the Elipsis is because it is a WiFi hotspot, not that it’s connecting to the GoGo WiFi. The purpose of the Ellipsis is to generate a WiFi hotspot from a phone signal, not to use WiFi.

Looking at the pending transactions on my Amex, sometimes they seem to process in real-time on Delta and sometimes they don't, I'm guessing it gets processed in real-time if their card scanners can connect to Delta's systems otherwise it gets deferred.

No unless something is broken

+1

Gogo outage plus FA speculation does not equal "sky is falling" because folks do or don't turn off their cell tech.

IF (and I am 99.999999999999999999999% certain the FA is wrong here) the FA is right this sounds like a major security flaw in GoGo...

I have a Verizon Jetpack, and that's exactly what it does.

I have a hard time believing that a Verizon Ellipsis Jetpack could maintain a reliable cellular link to ground towers during the flight. Odds are the passengers weren't working from their Jetpack during the flight as you assumed, but that the devices were passively sitting in the overhead where someone forgot to turn them off. I've seen plenty of hotspot signals on flights where GoGo worked perfectly. The alternative is that because GoGo was not working people tried their jetpacks.

Before anyone compares the jetpacks to the phones people used on the Pennsylvania flight which was hijacked on 9/11, that flight was flying well below 10,000 feet.

This

Even if the Jetpacks were connected they wouldn’t interfere with GoGo. They aren’t related systems. Jetpacks don’t use the GoGo WiFi. They use cell service.