SQ Y and PE to Iceland with Iceland Air (testing all the WiFi…)
Jan 14, 2018, 7:07 pm
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Join Date: May 2014
Location: Brisbane, Australia
Posts: 909
SQ Y and PE to Iceland with Iceland Air (testing all the WiFi…)
Sorry in advance, I don’t have any photos of seats or cabins as all the flights were very full and after a couple of google searches, you can find 1000’s of images showing the seats and cabins of the aircraft I flew on. I am mainly interested in posting the reviews of the in-flight connectivity I experienced but have also included a couple of other photos from the trip.
The return ticket on Singapore airlines was a split Economy and Premium economy ticket due to the fact that when I booked the flights they were scheduled to be operated by A330’s between Australia and Singapore. About 4-5 months ago Singapore airlines announced the switch of Brisbane flights from the A330 to the new A350’s.
Brisbane to Singapore - A350 - SQ256 - 22 December 2017 - Economy
The first flight was from Brisbane to Singapore. Bags were tagged through to Amsterdam in Brisbane and boarding passes were issued despite a nights stopover in Singapore. Being a Virgin Australia Gold card holder I used the Business Class check-in where priority tags were added to bags and an express pass departure card was also issued. The Singapore airlines lounge had a good food selection including the whole alcohol selection on offer at 7am in the morning (and several were definitely helping themselves…) The other notable point is that VA Gold/Star Gold card holders are treated the same as Business Class/PPS with all priority boarding conducted at once through one lane (different to other SQ ports). Boarding was quite snappy and after a short taxi to the runway, we were off...
The A350’s are fitted with WiFi and as I mentioned that’s what I’ll mainly review as it’s what there is less of on both FlyerTalk and the internet.
Prices are as follows:
1 hour - US$11.95
3 hours - US$16.95
Full flights (in reality 24 hours) - US$21.95
iPass and Boingo wifi roaming login is also available but I believe those users have access to a smaller shared bandwidth pool.
Inflight both PayPal and Credit/Debit cards are accepted and as soon as you press buy the payment will process and your time will start counting down.
I used a credit card which took a while to process so you see this screen for a while...
After a while, the page changed to connected...
Obviously, my first thought was let's do a speed test but after many failed attempts ("network communication error" I gave up and instead resorted to messenger and basic web browsing. It seemed that everyone... was trying to use it because at points it was basically unusable. Instagram/Snapchat also took a while and sending one took even longer but as I wasn't going anywhere for 7 hours time was not that important.
After about an hour into the flight, things got a little faster and I was able to run some speed tests. The first one was on fast.com and it certainly wasn't fast...
at this point, I still couldn't get Speedtest.net working but OzBroadband Speedtest has a server in the US which is where the Singapore Airlines satellite service seems to connect to the ground so I gave that a go and got a slightly faster speed. OzBroadband speedtest works by timing the download of an image (in my test is was 9mb) and then calculating the speed.
At this point the meals came and whilst I can't quite remember what was offered I do know I did eat it (so it obviously wasn't that bad right...) and after eating I began to play around with a VPN. I used the free Opera VPN to connect to the USA server and got a slightly faster 200kbps result. This ended up being enough speed to load YouTube at 144p resolution without buffering but I couldn't get a live stream to work without buffering which appeared to be the result of a high ping.
It was kinda cool to track my own flight on FlightRadar24 but about an hour after this, the internet dropped out and didn't work for the remainder of the flight.
The flight also featured the new Singapore airlines IFE which allowed you to select movies, tv and music programs from your phone. Also rather impressive but completely unnecessary was the ability to view flight info from the Singapore airlines app after linking your phone to the WiFi and then linking your phone to the seat (no charge involved for connecting the app to the WiFi). The reason why I say un unnecessary is every seat also had a touchscreen controller that displays the flight info.
The service onboard was also fine and we landed a bit early which was good. Across the entire flight, I measured my data usage and was able to download 230mb of data.
Singapore to Amsterdam - A350 - SQ324 - 23 December 2017 - Premium Economy
For the long overnight flight, I was in Premium Economy and whilst the experience was mainly the same they did have book the cook on offer so I'll quickly say what happened.
Boarding was a free for all as they used one of the gates at Changi that has the boarding pass scanner as you enter the gate area. When boarding begins the staff just make announcements like Business class/PPS are free to board now but no one seems to enforce it so by the time they called Premium Economy it seemed half the plane was queueing at the door down to the airbridge.
Once onboard we got settled in with a bigger pillow, blanket and noise canceling headphones already at the seat. Unlike Qantas or Air New Zealand Premium Economy (both of which I've tried out before) there were no pre-departure drinks and the whole service was rather Economy like. The drinks came from the Economy trolley (with the addition of Champagne) that sat on the trolley as it was pushed from PE to begin serving Economy. The Book the Cook meals are brought out first and unlike previous reviews, they are least offering and bringing drinks to your seat when your Book the Cook meal arrives. I had the Beef Brisket which was only slightly better than the Economy meals on Singapore airlines and worse than other airlines Economy meals like Korean Airlines.
After the dinner was served the lights were turned off and every Premium Economy passenger was handed a bottle of water. This was also the last time the flight attendants were to be seen after dinner and they didn't shut the curtain between Premium Economy or Economy either. Breakfast was also a book the cooked meal of Pancakes with Eggs and Bacon and as I'm not a fan of hot breakfasts this was rather disappointing (both other dishes on the menu were also hot meals). The pancakes were dry and I didn't touch the eggs and bacon as they looked worse than most other Economy breakfasts I've tried.
Being an overnight flight I didn't bother with the WiFi but I tried with no luck to get the Inflight Mobile roaming working. My home provider Optus wouldn't register on the AeroMobile 3G network and whilst the other sim card I had with me the StarHub prepaid sim card would register they didn't have an agreement for prepaid services so I couldn't actually do anything once connected to the network.
We landed in Amsterdam a little late and it took almost 20 minutes for the Business Class luggage to make an appearance on the luggage belt (and I wasn't even the first one off and through passport control).
Amsterdam to Reykjavik - B767 - FI501 - 28 December 2017 - Economy
We arrived at the airport around 2 hours prior to the flight and having online checked one would expect that the bag drop would be quick and easy. I was expecting something else... just a few days before our flight there had been a few people who had shammed the Iceland Air contract staff in Amsterdam on twitter. The Twitter support staff said they'd contact the station manager but obviously a few days later that message hadn't got through.
We arrived at a reasonably short queue of just 4 people in the bag drop line, no one in the regular Economy line and just one person in the Business queue. Despite 4 desks being open, the queue moved at a rate of ~1 person every 5 minutes.
What made things worse was the desks they had open. One was a priority desk, two were bag drop desks and the final one was an economy queue. Someone showed up in the regular line and got called over within minutes (to a bag drop desk) which didn't go down so well with the person at the front of the queue. The person at the bag drop queue then yelled out that's not fair and then said: "that it's the rules". Personally, I'd love to know which rule tells staff they must call the Economy line to the bag drop desks first but a couple of minutes of arguing occurred and then finally another staff member at a different desk was free and helped that person at the front of the bag drop queue.
Luckily security was queue free but it seemed everyone was going through the full body scanner and also getting a rather intrusive down the pants pat down and then a full bag search. That sort of behavior leads me to put the TSA above Amsterdam security as I even got to witness one security staff member asking an older passenger do you have an Laptop, iPad etc... and before the security staff member finished they said they didn't have an electronic devices at which point the security staff member yelled "Let me finish talking". The whole process was rather amusing and took a while for something which other airports like LAX and Heathrow can do faster.
Boarding was also one of the funniest processes I've ever seen. There were two agents at the gate to facilitate the boarding process which took almost 45 minutes to fully board the 767. Boarding began with business class and then was called by 5 rows at a time. One agent just sat at the desk and the other actually did the boarding she would go over to the computer and select the automatic announcement on the computer and then walk back and continue scanning boarding passes. Not only was it slow because it was just one person but she'd also wait for everyone from that group to come forward before walking back over to the computer and selecting the next group. After about 20 minutes the lead FA came off the plane to the boarding gate and started yelling at the one agent asking why it was taking so long. The whole thing was again very amusing to watch and in my many years of flying I've never seen the FA get off the plane and begin to yell at the gate agent but I guess there is a first for everything.
Finally, when I got onboard I was able to try out Iceland Air's in-flight WiFi...
Iceland Air claims to have gate to gate wifi but this didn't seem to be the case with the WiFi only operating after takeoff on this flight. The flight was 3 hours and access for the entire flight was just 4 Euro (If you're in Business Class access is free for two devices). Again the first thing I did was a speedtest (I also used OzBroadband Speedtest on the USA server and got 1.62 Mbps:
Access was fine for web browsing music streaming and even 480p YouTube loaded ok. There was one slightly annoying thing which other Android users might have a problem with... Iceland air uses HTML injection to display your flight details and a link back to wifi connection portal. As a result, Android never full detected a working internet connection so it displayed the following in settings as if there was no internet connection...
and here is what the webpages looked like with the Iceland Air banner. The flight time in the WiFi portal was also incorrect as it thought we had 9 hours to go despite being a 3 hour flight. In the photo below I was check-in the Northern lights forecast.
When we got around 1 hour away from Iceland it seemed that everyone got off the WiFi and another speedtest proved this was the case.
A download speed of 45mbps is crazy fast for WiFi on a plane and it made everything including 720p YouTube live streams possible (1080p doesn't appear on mobile). 45mbps download is actually faster than my home internet of 36mbps and just to make sure I did several other speed tests whilst flying, on approach and on the ground. The fastest download was 46.32mbps, the fastest upload 0.67mbps and the fastest ping was the initial 666ms.
Iceland
Upon arrival into Reykjavik, there were long queues for rental cars but luckily no queue for the Hertz Gold Club and shortly after landing I was off to the Ion Adventure Hotel. I'm only mentioning this hotel because of the Northern Lights. Upon check-in, they offer an opt into a Northen lights wakeup call and so at any time during the night (even at 2am) they'll call your room to wake you up as they tell you which spots near the hotel you can see the Northern lights.
Amazingly at 9 pm on our first of two nights stay we got the call and they said to come out of the car park and sure enough, the Northern lights were indeed visible just on the Horizon.
(Sorry about the size... I didn't compress these photos as I didn't want to wreck them even more, these were just taken on a digital camera and slightly zoomed in hence the graininess. I'm not a photographer and certainly, don't call myself one.)
Reykjavik was where I welcomed in the New Years and I'd highly recommend New Year's Eve in Reykjavik to anyone looking for something a bit different but also very exciting.
In Iceland, fireworks are illegal like they are in all of Australia (except the Northern Territory) but Unlike Australia, they magically become legal during the Christmas and New Years period.
Fireworks are sold from roughly 20 December until 31 December and can legally be lit between 24 December and 7 January. This strange law causes the Icelandic people to go crazy with fireworks between this period and new years eve is no exception. In fact there is quite a specific ritual on New Year's Eve which goes like the following. At 5pm they sit down for a quick family dinner before heading out at 6pm to the local community bonfire. The bonfires happen all over the country and are lit sometime between 6pm and 6:30pm. I walked around 1.5km down to the beach from the centre of Reykjavik to the closest bonfire which was massive. Probably about 7m high and equally as wide the thing was massive and filled with all kinds of wood (pallets, old furniture etc) which it then lit as a symbol to burn off the past year.
The bonfire I went to was lit at 6:30pm by the local fire department and was done by pouring fuel all over the wood and then using a blow torch (all very professional stuff...).
On the 1.5km walk down to the beach, all I could see and hear were fireworks along the horizon and of a similar height and quality as to what you get when the professionals do it. Officially fireworks are banned at the bonfire due to the number of people nearby but this didn’t stop a few who decided to launch quite a few fireworks from the crowd. To make it all more impressive a couple of people had launched drones to capture the bonfire and a few of the people with fireworks thought it would be funny to aim at the drones and whilst there were no successful hits there was some very close near misses.
At 10:30 pm a TV show a comedy show on one of Iceland's two TV channels airs and it’s watched by 90% of the population and then after it ends at 11:30 pm it’s time for continuous fireworks until around 1 am when all the Icelandics seem to go to bed.
The entire night was very entertaining and rather exciting as it was basically a continuous fireworks show that goes on for hours. At one point people were even setting fireworks off the roof of the hotel which caused the fire alarm to go off several times.
Zurich to Singapore - A380 - SQ345 - 11 January 2018 - Premium Economy
After leaving Iceland I flew BA from Reykjavik to London had a couple of nights in London before then flying BA to Geneva. Both flights were sooooooo uneventful and I won't bore you with the details. The remainder of the trip was spent in the Saint Gervais ski area (in the photo below). But we did drive up to Zurich the day before the flight home.
Anyway back to the flight home...
Singapore Airlines had several desks open and even though I could have used the Business class queue I just went to the Premium Economy line as there was no one in either of the two queues. My bag was tagged all the way back to Brisbane and again boarding passes were issued for both flights. The check-in agent also wrote a gate number on my boarding pass as it didn't print with one (Zurich Airport on displays gate numbers 1hr 30 mins prior to departure).
As a Virgin Australia Gold card holder I do get lounge access but only at airports where Singapore Airlines operates their own lounge and Zurich isn't one of them so I instead had a walk around the terminal before catching the transfer train to the E gates.
At Zurich, Singapore Airlines use an interesting setup with their A380 boarding. They actually use two different gates (with different gate numbers). The downstairs one E67 is used for Economy Boarding by Rows (with no priority queues in sight). Upstairs gate E59 is used for Priority Boarding where they've got three separate lanes set up (Suites, Business/PPS, and finally Premium Economy/Star Gold). The whole process is quite efficient and very orderly. However, it did create a bit of confusion as there is a lack of Economy Queue upstairs and people getting off the train see the signs for Singapore airlines but down always realise they'll most likely board downstairs.
Once onboard I got settled into the same premium economy seat as the A350 with only 2 minor differences. Firstly the seats at the window had quite a gap between the wall/seat and also the entertainment system was the older version with the older remote. There is also a lot more Premium Economy seats which means that one flight attendant is dedicated to the cabin (or at least spends more time serving the premium economy cabin). Service was also much better than the earlier A350 flights with several drinks and snacks being offered through the cabin after the first meal was severed and throughout the night.
The older A380’s also have OnAir wifi and mobile systems and here is how that went…
WiFi appears online automatically (unlike the A350’s where it’s switched on by the crew) after 10,000 feet and at this point, the OnAir phone network also appears.
WiFi prices are almost as expensive as my home providers international data roaming fee (AU$0.5 per MB)
15MB - US$6.99 (US$0.466 per MB)
30MB - US$12.99 (US$0.433 per MB)
50MB - US$19.99 (US$0.399 per MB)
and because of the rather expensive prices and low data limits I gave the service a miss on today's flight. Surprisingly I was able to connect to the OnAir phone network something that wasn’t possible initially when using the same sim card on the AeroMobile network on the A350’s.
In fact, every sim card will connect to the OnAir network and would get the welcome text message but only those with a roaming agreement would work.
If your carrier doesn’t have a roaming agreement when you respond to the message it just replies with “We’re sorry, your subscription with your mobile service provider does now allow you to roam or use OnAir GSM services”. But as my provider does I then got the following messages.
followed by the rates
Singapore airlines on both OnAir and AeroMobile block voice calls over the phone network and if you use the WiFi they also block VoIP, Skype and a few other voice call over wifi services. On the A350's I tried using a VPN but it was so slow the upload and ping that calls just timed out.
This meant that it was only possible to use the OnAir data either via the WiFi or for either the $2 per MB mobile data or $1 per message text messages. To make matters worse I wasn't able to get data roaming connected and every attempt would end in it failing which meant that I could only send text messages.
So all up the OnAir was a bit of a fail with crazy expensive data prices. The new Singapore Airline A380's are meant to be better with 500MB data for only $29.99 and supposedly better speeds so maybe I'll have to try it out as well...
Meanwhile back to the flight. The food onboard was much better and both book the cook meal were something that I would have been happy to be served in business class. For the first meal, I had the Beef Tenderloin which was well cooked and served with some ok vegetables. The breakfast book the cook was also quite nice although rather small as I selected the Swiss Cheese and Meats plate that came with 2 slices of each of the three different meats (Prosciutto, Salami, and Ham) with two bits of cheese.
Singapore to Brisbane - A350 - SQ245 - 13 January 2018 - Economy
This flight again boarded from the exact same gate as the previous Amsterdam flight so again boarding was a free for all once people realised that it wasn't enforced (or either half of the Economy passengers on our flight were PPS card holders
). Once onboard it took quite a while for boarding to finish and then we had to wait an additional 15 minutes before pushback was granted and then a long taxi to the runway.
After takeoff it wasn't until well past 25,000 feet before the seatbelt sign was turned off and both crew and passengers remained seated the entire time. It wasn't also until this time when the WiFi and AeroMobile system was turned on. Again like last time my phone didn't work (which was odd as it had just worked on the OnAir flight) but I was able to try out the in-flight WiFi so I got another 24 hour pass and put the system to the test.
The first test was a fast.com speedtest as I still couldn't get the speedtest.net app to work.
Again the speed was similar to last time... and when using a VPN
Another almost identical result. It was only then when I remembered that the next beta.speedtest.net didn't use flash and by running Chrome and selecting the "load desktop page" that it should work and surprisingly it did.
A ping of 801, download of 6.37mbps and an upload of 0.00mbps.... not too bad now. A couple of minutes later I did another test and got a ping of 798, download of 3.96mbps and an upload of 0.25mbps but then I did another Fast.com test and only got 130kbps (so maybe fast.com is shaped?)
YouTube even started working in 360p without a VPN and it even was willing to show the Video Quality Report for the backhaul provider based in the US (I'm going to guess most of the SD loads are coming from in-flight wifi).
One of the fastest tests, I got was around 1 hour prior to landing
and finally, I did a test around 12 minutes prior to landing...
Which gave the fastest ping of the entire flight. The system was switched off a couple of minutes after I did this test at ~10 minutes prior to landing.
The rest of the flight was uneventful but the food was awful and I even got a cup of lukewarm water served with the meal. Thankfully we arrived almost on time and the priority bags came out reasonably quickly.
Thanks for following along... I know it's a bit long boring and different compared to most trip reports but I hope it helps some people as I know there are now many who are choosing flights dependent on if they have in-flight WiFi or not. If you've got any additional questions I'd be happy to answer them as well
Interested in strange airlines not everyone's heard about - A few years ago I got to travel on an Air Calin A330 - Brief Trip Report
The return ticket on Singapore airlines was a split Economy and Premium economy ticket due to the fact that when I booked the flights they were scheduled to be operated by A330’s between Australia and Singapore. About 4-5 months ago Singapore airlines announced the switch of Brisbane flights from the A330 to the new A350’s.
Brisbane to Singapore - A350 - SQ256 - 22 December 2017 - Economy
The first flight was from Brisbane to Singapore. Bags were tagged through to Amsterdam in Brisbane and boarding passes were issued despite a nights stopover in Singapore. Being a Virgin Australia Gold card holder I used the Business Class check-in where priority tags were added to bags and an express pass departure card was also issued. The Singapore airlines lounge had a good food selection including the whole alcohol selection on offer at 7am in the morning (and several were definitely helping themselves…) The other notable point is that VA Gold/Star Gold card holders are treated the same as Business Class/PPS with all priority boarding conducted at once through one lane (different to other SQ ports). Boarding was quite snappy and after a short taxi to the runway, we were off...
The A350’s are fitted with WiFi and as I mentioned that’s what I’ll mainly review as it’s what there is less of on both FlyerTalk and the internet.
Prices are as follows:
1 hour - US$11.95
3 hours - US$16.95
Full flights (in reality 24 hours) - US$21.95
iPass and Boingo wifi roaming login is also available but I believe those users have access to a smaller shared bandwidth pool.
Inflight both PayPal and Credit/Debit cards are accepted and as soon as you press buy the payment will process and your time will start counting down.
I used a credit card which took a while to process so you see this screen for a while...
After a while, the page changed to connected...
Obviously, my first thought was let's do a speed test but after many failed attempts ("network communication error" I gave up and instead resorted to messenger and basic web browsing. It seemed that everyone... was trying to use it because at points it was basically unusable. Instagram/Snapchat also took a while and sending one took even longer but as I wasn't going anywhere for 7 hours time was not that important.
After about an hour into the flight, things got a little faster and I was able to run some speed tests. The first one was on fast.com and it certainly wasn't fast...
at this point, I still couldn't get Speedtest.net working but OzBroadband Speedtest has a server in the US which is where the Singapore Airlines satellite service seems to connect to the ground so I gave that a go and got a slightly faster speed. OzBroadband speedtest works by timing the download of an image (in my test is was 9mb) and then calculating the speed.
At this point the meals came and whilst I can't quite remember what was offered I do know I did eat it (so it obviously wasn't that bad right...) and after eating I began to play around with a VPN. I used the free Opera VPN to connect to the USA server and got a slightly faster 200kbps result. This ended up being enough speed to load YouTube at 144p resolution without buffering but I couldn't get a live stream to work without buffering which appeared to be the result of a high ping.
It was kinda cool to track my own flight on FlightRadar24 but about an hour after this, the internet dropped out and didn't work for the remainder of the flight.
The flight also featured the new Singapore airlines IFE which allowed you to select movies, tv and music programs from your phone. Also rather impressive but completely unnecessary was the ability to view flight info from the Singapore airlines app after linking your phone to the WiFi and then linking your phone to the seat (no charge involved for connecting the app to the WiFi). The reason why I say un unnecessary is every seat also had a touchscreen controller that displays the flight info.
The service onboard was also fine and we landed a bit early which was good. Across the entire flight, I measured my data usage and was able to download 230mb of data.
Singapore to Amsterdam - A350 - SQ324 - 23 December 2017 - Premium Economy
For the long overnight flight, I was in Premium Economy and whilst the experience was mainly the same they did have book the cook on offer so I'll quickly say what happened.
Boarding was a free for all as they used one of the gates at Changi that has the boarding pass scanner as you enter the gate area. When boarding begins the staff just make announcements like Business class/PPS are free to board now but no one seems to enforce it so by the time they called Premium Economy it seemed half the plane was queueing at the door down to the airbridge.
Once onboard we got settled in with a bigger pillow, blanket and noise canceling headphones already at the seat. Unlike Qantas or Air New Zealand Premium Economy (both of which I've tried out before) there were no pre-departure drinks and the whole service was rather Economy like. The drinks came from the Economy trolley (with the addition of Champagne) that sat on the trolley as it was pushed from PE to begin serving Economy. The Book the Cook meals are brought out first and unlike previous reviews, they are least offering and bringing drinks to your seat when your Book the Cook meal arrives. I had the Beef Brisket which was only slightly better than the Economy meals on Singapore airlines and worse than other airlines Economy meals like Korean Airlines.
After the dinner was served the lights were turned off and every Premium Economy passenger was handed a bottle of water. This was also the last time the flight attendants were to be seen after dinner and they didn't shut the curtain between Premium Economy or Economy either. Breakfast was also a book the cooked meal of Pancakes with Eggs and Bacon and as I'm not a fan of hot breakfasts this was rather disappointing (both other dishes on the menu were also hot meals). The pancakes were dry and I didn't touch the eggs and bacon as they looked worse than most other Economy breakfasts I've tried.
Being an overnight flight I didn't bother with the WiFi but I tried with no luck to get the Inflight Mobile roaming working. My home provider Optus wouldn't register on the AeroMobile 3G network and whilst the other sim card I had with me the StarHub prepaid sim card would register they didn't have an agreement for prepaid services so I couldn't actually do anything once connected to the network.
We landed in Amsterdam a little late and it took almost 20 minutes for the Business Class luggage to make an appearance on the luggage belt (and I wasn't even the first one off and through passport control).
Amsterdam to Reykjavik - B767 - FI501 - 28 December 2017 - Economy
We arrived at the airport around 2 hours prior to the flight and having online checked one would expect that the bag drop would be quick and easy. I was expecting something else... just a few days before our flight there had been a few people who had shammed the Iceland Air contract staff in Amsterdam on twitter. The Twitter support staff said they'd contact the station manager but obviously a few days later that message hadn't got through.
We arrived at a reasonably short queue of just 4 people in the bag drop line, no one in the regular Economy line and just one person in the Business queue. Despite 4 desks being open, the queue moved at a rate of ~1 person every 5 minutes.
What made things worse was the desks they had open. One was a priority desk, two were bag drop desks and the final one was an economy queue. Someone showed up in the regular line and got called over within minutes (to a bag drop desk) which didn't go down so well with the person at the front of the queue. The person at the bag drop queue then yelled out that's not fair and then said: "that it's the rules". Personally, I'd love to know which rule tells staff they must call the Economy line to the bag drop desks first but a couple of minutes of arguing occurred and then finally another staff member at a different desk was free and helped that person at the front of the bag drop queue.
Luckily security was queue free but it seemed everyone was going through the full body scanner and also getting a rather intrusive down the pants pat down and then a full bag search. That sort of behavior leads me to put the TSA above Amsterdam security as I even got to witness one security staff member asking an older passenger do you have an Laptop, iPad etc... and before the security staff member finished they said they didn't have an electronic devices at which point the security staff member yelled "Let me finish talking". The whole process was rather amusing and took a while for something which other airports like LAX and Heathrow can do faster.
Boarding was also one of the funniest processes I've ever seen. There were two agents at the gate to facilitate the boarding process which took almost 45 minutes to fully board the 767. Boarding began with business class and then was called by 5 rows at a time. One agent just sat at the desk and the other actually did the boarding she would go over to the computer and select the automatic announcement on the computer and then walk back and continue scanning boarding passes. Not only was it slow because it was just one person but she'd also wait for everyone from that group to come forward before walking back over to the computer and selecting the next group. After about 20 minutes the lead FA came off the plane to the boarding gate and started yelling at the one agent asking why it was taking so long. The whole thing was again very amusing to watch and in my many years of flying I've never seen the FA get off the plane and begin to yell at the gate agent but I guess there is a first for everything.
Finally, when I got onboard I was able to try out Iceland Air's in-flight WiFi...
Iceland Air claims to have gate to gate wifi but this didn't seem to be the case with the WiFi only operating after takeoff on this flight. The flight was 3 hours and access for the entire flight was just 4 Euro (If you're in Business Class access is free for two devices). Again the first thing I did was a speedtest (I also used OzBroadband Speedtest on the USA server and got 1.62 Mbps:
Access was fine for web browsing music streaming and even 480p YouTube loaded ok. There was one slightly annoying thing which other Android users might have a problem with... Iceland air uses HTML injection to display your flight details and a link back to wifi connection portal. As a result, Android never full detected a working internet connection so it displayed the following in settings as if there was no internet connection...
and here is what the webpages looked like with the Iceland Air banner. The flight time in the WiFi portal was also incorrect as it thought we had 9 hours to go despite being a 3 hour flight. In the photo below I was check-in the Northern lights forecast.
When we got around 1 hour away from Iceland it seemed that everyone got off the WiFi and another speedtest proved this was the case.
A download speed of 45mbps is crazy fast for WiFi on a plane and it made everything including 720p YouTube live streams possible (1080p doesn't appear on mobile). 45mbps download is actually faster than my home internet of 36mbps and just to make sure I did several other speed tests whilst flying, on approach and on the ground. The fastest download was 46.32mbps, the fastest upload 0.67mbps and the fastest ping was the initial 666ms.
Iceland
Upon arrival into Reykjavik, there were long queues for rental cars but luckily no queue for the Hertz Gold Club and shortly after landing I was off to the Ion Adventure Hotel. I'm only mentioning this hotel because of the Northern Lights. Upon check-in, they offer an opt into a Northen lights wakeup call and so at any time during the night (even at 2am) they'll call your room to wake you up as they tell you which spots near the hotel you can see the Northern lights.
Amazingly at 9 pm on our first of two nights stay we got the call and they said to come out of the car park and sure enough, the Northern lights were indeed visible just on the Horizon.
(Sorry about the size... I didn't compress these photos as I didn't want to wreck them even more, these were just taken on a digital camera and slightly zoomed in hence the graininess. I'm not a photographer and certainly, don't call myself one.)
Reykjavik was where I welcomed in the New Years and I'd highly recommend New Year's Eve in Reykjavik to anyone looking for something a bit different but also very exciting.
In Iceland, fireworks are illegal like they are in all of Australia (except the Northern Territory) but Unlike Australia, they magically become legal during the Christmas and New Years period.
Fireworks are sold from roughly 20 December until 31 December and can legally be lit between 24 December and 7 January. This strange law causes the Icelandic people to go crazy with fireworks between this period and new years eve is no exception. In fact there is quite a specific ritual on New Year's Eve which goes like the following. At 5pm they sit down for a quick family dinner before heading out at 6pm to the local community bonfire. The bonfires happen all over the country and are lit sometime between 6pm and 6:30pm. I walked around 1.5km down to the beach from the centre of Reykjavik to the closest bonfire which was massive. Probably about 7m high and equally as wide the thing was massive and filled with all kinds of wood (pallets, old furniture etc) which it then lit as a symbol to burn off the past year.
The bonfire I went to was lit at 6:30pm by the local fire department and was done by pouring fuel all over the wood and then using a blow torch (all very professional stuff...).
On the 1.5km walk down to the beach, all I could see and hear were fireworks along the horizon and of a similar height and quality as to what you get when the professionals do it. Officially fireworks are banned at the bonfire due to the number of people nearby but this didn’t stop a few who decided to launch quite a few fireworks from the crowd. To make it all more impressive a couple of people had launched drones to capture the bonfire and a few of the people with fireworks thought it would be funny to aim at the drones and whilst there were no successful hits there was some very close near misses.
At 10:30 pm a TV show a comedy show on one of Iceland's two TV channels airs and it’s watched by 90% of the population and then after it ends at 11:30 pm it’s time for continuous fireworks until around 1 am when all the Icelandics seem to go to bed.
The entire night was very entertaining and rather exciting as it was basically a continuous fireworks show that goes on for hours. At one point people were even setting fireworks off the roof of the hotel which caused the fire alarm to go off several times.
Zurich to Singapore - A380 - SQ345 - 11 January 2018 - Premium Economy
After leaving Iceland I flew BA from Reykjavik to London had a couple of nights in London before then flying BA to Geneva. Both flights were sooooooo uneventful and I won't bore you with the details. The remainder of the trip was spent in the Saint Gervais ski area (in the photo below). But we did drive up to Zurich the day before the flight home.
Anyway back to the flight home...
Singapore Airlines had several desks open and even though I could have used the Business class queue I just went to the Premium Economy line as there was no one in either of the two queues. My bag was tagged all the way back to Brisbane and again boarding passes were issued for both flights. The check-in agent also wrote a gate number on my boarding pass as it didn't print with one (Zurich Airport on displays gate numbers 1hr 30 mins prior to departure).
As a Virgin Australia Gold card holder I do get lounge access but only at airports where Singapore Airlines operates their own lounge and Zurich isn't one of them so I instead had a walk around the terminal before catching the transfer train to the E gates.
At Zurich, Singapore Airlines use an interesting setup with their A380 boarding. They actually use two different gates (with different gate numbers). The downstairs one E67 is used for Economy Boarding by Rows (with no priority queues in sight). Upstairs gate E59 is used for Priority Boarding where they've got three separate lanes set up (Suites, Business/PPS, and finally Premium Economy/Star Gold). The whole process is quite efficient and very orderly. However, it did create a bit of confusion as there is a lack of Economy Queue upstairs and people getting off the train see the signs for Singapore airlines but down always realise they'll most likely board downstairs.
Once onboard I got settled into the same premium economy seat as the A350 with only 2 minor differences. Firstly the seats at the window had quite a gap between the wall/seat and also the entertainment system was the older version with the older remote. There is also a lot more Premium Economy seats which means that one flight attendant is dedicated to the cabin (or at least spends more time serving the premium economy cabin). Service was also much better than the earlier A350 flights with several drinks and snacks being offered through the cabin after the first meal was severed and throughout the night.
The older A380’s also have OnAir wifi and mobile systems and here is how that went…
WiFi appears online automatically (unlike the A350’s where it’s switched on by the crew) after 10,000 feet and at this point, the OnAir phone network also appears.
WiFi prices are almost as expensive as my home providers international data roaming fee (AU$0.5 per MB)
15MB - US$6.99 (US$0.466 per MB)
30MB - US$12.99 (US$0.433 per MB)
50MB - US$19.99 (US$0.399 per MB)
and because of the rather expensive prices and low data limits I gave the service a miss on today's flight. Surprisingly I was able to connect to the OnAir phone network something that wasn’t possible initially when using the same sim card on the AeroMobile network on the A350’s.
In fact, every sim card will connect to the OnAir network and would get the welcome text message but only those with a roaming agreement would work.
If your carrier doesn’t have a roaming agreement when you respond to the message it just replies with “We’re sorry, your subscription with your mobile service provider does now allow you to roam or use OnAir GSM services”. But as my provider does I then got the following messages.
followed by the rates
Singapore airlines on both OnAir and AeroMobile block voice calls over the phone network and if you use the WiFi they also block VoIP, Skype and a few other voice call over wifi services. On the A350's I tried using a VPN but it was so slow the upload and ping that calls just timed out.
This meant that it was only possible to use the OnAir data either via the WiFi or for either the $2 per MB mobile data or $1 per message text messages. To make matters worse I wasn't able to get data roaming connected and every attempt would end in it failing which meant that I could only send text messages.
So all up the OnAir was a bit of a fail with crazy expensive data prices. The new Singapore Airline A380's are meant to be better with 500MB data for only $29.99 and supposedly better speeds so maybe I'll have to try it out as well...
Meanwhile back to the flight. The food onboard was much better and both book the cook meal were something that I would have been happy to be served in business class. For the first meal, I had the Beef Tenderloin which was well cooked and served with some ok vegetables. The breakfast book the cook was also quite nice although rather small as I selected the Swiss Cheese and Meats plate that came with 2 slices of each of the three different meats (Prosciutto, Salami, and Ham) with two bits of cheese.
Singapore to Brisbane - A350 - SQ245 - 13 January 2018 - Economy
This flight again boarded from the exact same gate as the previous Amsterdam flight so again boarding was a free for all once people realised that it wasn't enforced (or either half of the Economy passengers on our flight were PPS card holders
). Once onboard it took quite a while for boarding to finish and then we had to wait an additional 15 minutes before pushback was granted and then a long taxi to the runway.After takeoff it wasn't until well past 25,000 feet before the seatbelt sign was turned off and both crew and passengers remained seated the entire time. It wasn't also until this time when the WiFi and AeroMobile system was turned on. Again like last time my phone didn't work (which was odd as it had just worked on the OnAir flight) but I was able to try out the in-flight WiFi so I got another 24 hour pass and put the system to the test.
The first test was a fast.com speedtest as I still couldn't get the speedtest.net app to work.
Again the speed was similar to last time... and when using a VPN
Another almost identical result. It was only then when I remembered that the next beta.speedtest.net didn't use flash and by running Chrome and selecting the "load desktop page" that it should work and surprisingly it did.
A ping of 801, download of 6.37mbps and an upload of 0.00mbps.... not too bad now. A couple of minutes later I did another test and got a ping of 798, download of 3.96mbps and an upload of 0.25mbps but then I did another Fast.com test and only got 130kbps (so maybe fast.com is shaped?)
YouTube even started working in 360p without a VPN and it even was willing to show the Video Quality Report for the backhaul provider based in the US (I'm going to guess most of the SD loads are coming from in-flight wifi).
One of the fastest tests, I got was around 1 hour prior to landing
and finally, I did a test around 12 minutes prior to landing...
Which gave the fastest ping of the entire flight. The system was switched off a couple of minutes after I did this test at ~10 minutes prior to landing.
The rest of the flight was uneventful but the food was awful and I even got a cup of lukewarm water served with the meal. Thankfully we arrived almost on time and the priority bags came out reasonably quickly.
Thanks for following along... I know it's a bit long boring and different compared to most trip reports but I hope it helps some people as I know there are now many who are choosing flights dependent on if they have in-flight WiFi or not. If you've got any additional questions I'd be happy to answer them as well
Interested in strange airlines not everyone's heard about - A few years ago I got to travel on an Air Calin A330 - Brief Trip Report
Jan 15, 2018, 4:12 am
#2
Join Date: Mar 2010
Location: Brisbane, Australia
Programs: VA Gold; IHG Diamond Elite; Hertz Presidents Club
Posts: 69
I'm doing the reverse of your trip soon, BNE-SIN-ZRH/AMS-SIN-BNE in PE (J for SIN-BNE though). It's a shame about the wifi and BTC issues. I enjoy SQ Y so hopefully I'll be happy with SQ PE and J.
Jan 16, 2018, 12:45 am
#3
Original Poster
Join Date: May 2014
Location: Brisbane, Australia
Posts: 909
Singapore's Premium Economy is just a few extra perks (some of which come with Star Gold status), a bigger seat and a slightly nicer pre-ordered meal. Air NZ and Qantas seem to offer a better seat than Economy but also top it off with Business Class service (in fact on many Air NZ flights the Business class and Premium Economy menus are the same).
Later this year I'm looking at BNE-NRT-HEL with the BNE-NRT in Qantas Economy (2-4-2 config with a set of two in the exit rows) and then Finnair Economy Comfort (2-3-2 in the first row and only $150 more per flight with 35" pitch vs 38" pitch in SQ premium Economy).