lincolnjkc

Ditto on GoGo being an annoying piece of junk -- most of my flights are on RJs and when it works at all it's usually at most about 1/3-1/2 of the fight duration -- usually less when you factor in meandering climbs to 10k and meandering descents under 10k -- and more often than not this year just not working at all. (I'm ~4 for 15 on RJ flights this quarter and 0 for 2 this week... )

Unfortunately AFAIK/AFAIHave Heard there are no changes on the horizon. Specifically with the RJ fleet I believe we're stuck with GoGo's pathetic ATG performance as I don't recall either the Thales or Panasonic solutions having STCs for the smaller aircraft and suspect they carry significant weight/performance penalties relative to smaller airframes that the GoGo ATG solution avoids. GoGo does have a few technology platforms (e.g. they have a satellite offering -- used by DL and VS, IIRC -- in addition to the ATG solution that UA uses, but UA has solely deployed the ATG offering)

IIRC the ATG solution is actually using the same RF spectrum that GTE's Airfone used way, way, way back when which may help to explain the performance issues/limitations. I strongly suspect any changes to to the technologies used to allow GoGo ATG Gate to Gate -- such as leveraging 5G -- would require hardware changes on each aircraft (antennas, LRUs, etc.) which given the state of airline finances at the moment is an investment I wouldn't be holding my breath for. 5G may also be troublesome given cell shaping and spacing relative to something moving high and fast, like an airplane, but that would also depend on the specific 5G technology and the cellular partner used.

DELee

A legacy airline's legacy. Ouch.

David

LarryJ

I have not heard anything new regarding inflight internet for some time. I think they have nine or ten 737-900s now with the ViaSat system instead of the Thales.

The RJ's system is a ground-based system so you're always going to have an issue at lower altitudes even if they removed the 10,000' cutout.

dmurphynj

It's worse than that.... this requires a new 5G network to be spun up. GoGo is supposedly launching theirs in 2021. Remember, they don't leverage commercial mobile services; they have their own set of ~250 towers with antennas pointed skyward. (Commercial antennas are highly directional and would be useless.). I also understand they're using unlicensed 2.4 & 5GHz ISM bands for their network .... that could get interesting, although given the unique properties of ATG, probably not nearly as subject to interference as the ISM bands are on the ground.

https://www.lightreading.com/mobile/.../d/d-id/755064

Keep in mind the current GoGo network is a 3G provider; their 4G upgrade never happened. So we're currently playing with 4Mhz of 3G CDMA spectrum. CDMA was wildly efficient for its day ... but that day has come and gone. We're talking a 25-50x+ slice of bandwidth for their 5G ATG network...

Going to be interesting - deploying a vRAN 5G network is much more complex than the CDMA "Buy our box and install it" designs.

edit: Just for fun, zoom in on this chart: https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/...wall_chart.pdf -- GoGo has the two slices between 849-851MHz and 894-896MHz. That's it for the entirety of the current ATG network.

asphaltman

This will be interesting to see how it plays out. That’s the downside of a regional heavy fleet.

For what it’s worth, I have found that while on an RJ, you can get online a little faster by going to www.airborne.gogoinflight.com. rather than wait for www.unitedwifi.com.