distrips

I normally just buy my internet on the plane. United sent an email this flight is serviced by Gogo (EWR-LAX) and buy in advance to save. $ 19.99 seemed high to me in advance. Does anyone know the regular price or have any tips. None of the promo codes I found when googling worked.

TIA

mherdeg

www.usmobile.com/wifi

$10 for 30 days of unlimited Gogo via Gogo's roaming partner iPass via a vendor called US Mobile selling a product that includes an iPass subscription.

Tips from my n=1 experience with the service so far:
1. This service ends up giving you a username & password for a vendor called "iPass". This is all you need to use Gogo wifi on a UA flight (you don't need to install their mobile app and it doesn't help).
2. What will happen is that you'll connect to the UA wifi network and go to the normal sign-up-and-pay flow to pay for wifi. Somewhere in here it will say "sign in to your Gogo account to use a pass!". Click that. Then there's a tab on the gogo sign in screen to sign in with one of their roaming partners (the only supported roaming partner is iPass). Type in your credentials there, and it should auth and sign you in to the gogo account then connect you to the Internet. I have screenshots of this whole flow because I hit some hiccups…
3. Tip -- be sure to write down your ipass username & password -- you'll need them to auth and won't have Internet access on the plane
4. If it doesn't work (i.e. it authenticates but then the wifi ssid connection suddenly dies and when you reconnect, it won't let you log in via iPass a second time and shows a cryptic error), just use Gogo's "Live chat" feature. Tell a support agent that it's broken and they'll give you a free pass for the flight. You'll need a Gogo account ,so maybe you should sign up for one of those ahead of time (they credited my Gogo free pass to an account with the same e-mail address as my iPass e-mail address).

This worked great for me and was better than the extortionate walk-up price offered on board a United Coast flight. I did burn about 5 min in support chat plus 15-20 min doing some futile low-level networking and higher-level application diagnostics. And I guess technically the service itself didn't work so much as the service recovery from Gogo because the service didn't work.

wh6cto

Wow, this is a great option. There's always something new to learn at Flyertalk!

On mainline UA, only the B752 w/ 28J uses GoGo. (UAX adds E170/175 and CR7.)

But the iPass website mentions Panasonic Avionics Corporation as a partner. So does this mean it can also work on aircraft with the Panasonic system? That would make this much more useful.

Even if this were the case, we would need to be able to tell which birds have Panasonic and which have Thales...which I have no idea.

sbm12

Not on UA's implementation of the PAC kit.


The 737s and a few 753s have Thales. The p.s. 752s & RJs have Gogo. Everything else is PAC.

TrAAvis

mherdeg, do you know if one's USMobile Username and Password are the same as one's iPass UN & PW? I set up my account a month ago and have already forgotten if I even created an iPass UN & PW or if USMobile forwards your USMobile login info to iPass. I do know that my password file indicates identical credentials for both USMobile & iPass.

The reason I ask is because I was on a United Express flight today which had Gogo Inflight, and I did what you suggested in #2 above. I entered what I had on file as my iPass UN & PW, which resulted in the Capcha page. I entered the Capcha, but the next page was an error which simply stated in plain text, "Sorry, Page not found!! Redirect??" The URL of the error page was from the airborne.gogoinflight.com domain. I did not think to contact inflight tech support, but it was a short flight anyway.

Thanks!

BThumme

I had that happen twice last week as well. They were shorter flights so I just sighed and let it be.

weero

This is beyond brilliant ^^^.

Do you happen to know if that works on intl flights and/or transoceanic flights?

WineCountryUA

See the earlier discussion (3 posts back), does not appear the system that UA uses for the majority of aircraft (Panasonic) is included. Just the GoGo system used on UX and the sUA PS aircraft.

sbm12

Not exactly. Panasonic is supported but UA's implementation of the PAC system is not. Fly on AA across the ocean using the PAC kit and the iPass credentials work great.

Short version is that it depends on how the airline and the service provider structure their contract to handle setting price and revenue sharing and other factors.

wxguy

SFO->BOS pmUA 752, had the failure. Used on-line support who verified I had purchased the service, and received the "free pass" for the flight. Not too painful. Worth it for $10 for the entire month on these birds -- I have four flights in the next 30 days.

emcampbe

that sounds like more of a generic error then a specific UN/pass error. Usually those tell you that the credentials don't match and allow you to try again or reset.

Which is a bummer, just like you can't use the free hour of GoGo for T-mobile customers that I'm pretty sure every other Us carrier with GoGo supports. T-mobile doesn't even seem to admit this - just that you get it on US carriers but nothing indicating UA/UAX is excluded.

CO_Nonrev_elite

Oddly enough, even though there is no sign in option for T-Mobile on the United flights, I have found that within 15-20 of takeoff, it ALWAYS starts working for free for me anyways for texting and iMessage.

drew in the air

Interesting. Will have to try it out next time I'm on a gogo united flight.

drew in the air

Actually it's not high relative to the on board price. I forgot to purchase the in advance offer last 2 trips, and EWR-LAX gogo internet on board price was 33.95 the first time and 39.95 the last time.

emcampbe

never seen that on a flight with GoGo. This almost always happens on 737 flights, IME. Was iMessaging much of flight 582 last week (YYZ-ORD, but we were diverted to STL).