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WestJet inflight WiFi needs to be better

WestJet inflight WiFi needs to be better

Old Dec 6, 2019, 9:57 pm
  #16  
 
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Originally Posted by aerobod
As mentioned quite a while ago, it is an issue relating to the RIAA and movie house approval for specific certified DRM packages which are all ancient, when playing recent movies on personal devices. It is a bureaucratic issue that Panasonic and other providers are caught in, with varying technology problems on PCs and Macs due to this certification issue. They need to approve the platform, so an iOS app deployed on a Mac would still need to pass through the bureaucracy.
In the meantime, the "How to connect to IFE" card in the seat back should include the wording "THIS WILL NOT WORK ON A MAC LAPTOP"

Saying you have something, and allowing customers to fiddle around trying to get it to work, when it really doesn't work on a Mac is actually worse than not having the system at all.
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Old Dec 6, 2019, 10:01 pm
  #17  
 
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I wish they had wifi on the Q400s
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Old Dec 6, 2019, 10:06 pm
  #18  
 
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Originally Posted by wdb1987
I wish they had wifi on the Q400s
I'm not aware of any airline that has WiFi on Q400s. Come to think of it, I don't think I've seen IFE or WiFi on any prop. plane.
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Old Dec 8, 2019, 12:07 pm
  #19  
 
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Originally Posted by Frequentlander
.

I'll pay WS a reasonable fee for in-flight WiFi.....when it works on a Mac Laptop. Right now it doesn't.
Sure it works. As for it being fast it will probably never be. The Chairman of Delta Airlines was recently quoted that they won't offer it for free because there's no way to make it work for all the passengers on a flight especially these days. Frankly if nobody can go 4-5 hours without the internet, that's pretty sad.
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Old Dec 8, 2019, 1:25 pm
  #20  
 
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Originally Posted by ricktoronto
Sure it works. As for it being fast it will probably never be. The Chairman of Delta Airlines was recently quoted that they won't offer it for free because there's no way to make it work for all the passengers on a flight especially these days. Frankly if nobody can go 4-5 hours without the internet, that's pretty sad.
See post #15 . I effed up and conflated "WiFi" and IFE.
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Old Dec 9, 2019, 8:40 am
  #21  
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Originally Posted by ricktoronto
Frankly if nobody can go 4-5 hours without the internet, that's pretty sad.
If I’m traveling for work, I’m traveling for an entire week. For me, that’s usually every second week. And if I’m traveling, I’m in non-stop meetings and presentations at my destinations.

Those weeks, my in-flight time is my only heads-down working time (unless I cut into my sleep and work late into the night at my hotel, or cut into my weekends at home). Since my US destinations are rarely non-stops from YYC, I easily spend 4 to 5 hours in flight on my outbound and the same coming back. That’s a lot of time out of my work week. I don’t sit there watching movies.

I need to be connected in order to work effectively.

As a business traveler, reliable and functioning in-flight Internet is important to me. For me, it works very well on DL and UA, but - the point of this thread - not well on WS.
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Old Dec 10, 2019, 10:05 am
  #22  
 
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Originally Posted by Frequentlander
I'm not aware of any airline that has WiFi on Q400s. Come to think of it, I don't think I've seen IFE or WiFi on any prop. plane.
Yeah not really an expectation, more just a fun bonus feature to have. I can live without work emails for an hour!
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Old Dec 11, 2019, 5:20 pm
  #23  
 
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Originally Posted by FlyerJ
If I’m traveling for work, I’m traveling for an entire week. For me, that’s usually every second week. And if I’m traveling, I’m in non-stop meetings and presentations at my destinations.

Those weeks, my in-flight time is my only heads-down working time (unless I cut into my sleep and work late into the night at my hotel, or cut into my weekends at home). Since my US destinations are rarely non-stops from YYC, I easily spend 4 to 5 hours in flight on my outbound and the same coming back. That’s a lot of time out of my work week. I don’t sit there watching movies.

I need to be connected in order to work effectively.

As a business traveler, reliable and functioning in-flight Internet is important to me. For me, it works very well on DL and UA, but - the point of this thread - not well on WS.
I'm retired now but when I worked I was able to work offline on e-mail (the most copious and annoying work) and files and managed well in the office without being online. Maybe even in the office, it would have been better to have 4-5 hours a day blacked out. You can figure out how to survive, somehow. Like DL and UA instead of WS and it's feeble internet.
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Old Dec 11, 2019, 8:11 pm
  #24  
 
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Originally Posted by ricktoronto
I'm retired now but when I worked I was able to work offline on e-mail (the most copious and annoying work) and files and managed well in the office without being online. Maybe even in the office, it would have been better to have 4-5 hours a day blacked out. You can figure out how to survive, somehow. Like DL and UA instead of WS and it's feeble internet.
There are advantages to working off line:
  • No one is e-mailing me and breaking my train (clown car) of thought
  • That e-mail that is waiting to be sent when I land can be edited again and again before pressing send, thereby reducing the amount of profanity
  • The excuse of "I was in the air...couldn't connect" is probably good for another decade
So not being able to connect can sometimes have it's benefits.
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Old Dec 11, 2019, 8:20 pm
  #25  
 
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Originally Posted by Frequentlander
There are advantages to working off line:
  • No one is e-mailing me and breaking my train (clown car) of thought
  • That e-mail that is waiting to be sent when I land can be edited again and again before pressing send, thereby reducing the amount of profanity
  • The excuse of "I was in the air...couldn't connect" is probably good for another decade
So not being able to connect can sometimes have it's benefits.
Well said and I completely agree. I guess I have to agree, since like others, I have never been able to get the internet access to work satisfactorily on my Mac laptop either.
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Old Dec 12, 2019, 8:28 am
  #26  
 
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https://m.sfgate.com/travel/article/...i-14896881.php

Why airline in-flight Wi-Fi is so terrible

Slowly but surely it's getting better, but still spotty

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Old Dec 14, 2019, 3:05 pm
  #27  
 
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Originally Posted by Frequentlander
There are advantages to working off line:
  • No one is e-mailing me and breaking my train (clown car) of thought
  • That e-mail that is waiting to be sent when I land can be edited again and again before pressing send, thereby reducing the amount of profanity
  • The excuse of "I was in the air...couldn't connect" is probably good for another decade
So not being able to connect can sometimes have it's benefits.
People survived having to go by ship from Europe to North America and now cannot survive 5 hours without Facebook. As for connecting to wifi on a Mac, it connects fine, I just have zero desire to "surf" at US Robotics 56K modem speeds.

It's hard to beat the feeling of not being connected to email while already suffering through business travel so you make good points.

Anyone equipped with non-Flintstones technology can work offline and connect when they land.
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Old Dec 16, 2019, 7:22 pm
  #28  
 
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Originally Posted by aerobod
The reason you see better performance on your phone vs PC on WestJet is due to the differences between satellite based Internet and air-to-ground cellular Internet. Panasonic Aero uses only geostationary satellites to give worldwide coverage, Gogo uses ATG cellular to cover just the continental US and a small part of Canada.

Satellite Internet has a latency around 700ms, ATG about 100ms, so synchronous packet flows will turnaround about 7 times slower due to the speed of light delay. The US is in a unique position in the world in having ATG coverage at very low cost, but the rest of the world is generally only covered by satellite. In the future low-earth satellite mesh systems will provide similar or better performance to ATG, but it will take an aircraft IFEC antenna and receiver refit at the cost of about $300K per aircraft for compatibility.

Delta and United use ATG on most of their narrow body fleet due to having about 80% coverage where they fly them, WestJet would only have about 30% coverage with ATG for their jet fleet routes. United and Emirates uses Panasonic Aero for their widebody fleets.
Couple of observations:

1) Commercially operating LEO constellations (SpaceX, OneWeb) are 3-4 years away. Forget the hype, there are significant technical difficulties in getting mobility working effectively for LEO megaconstellations. And that's without addressing the need to replace that $300k of onboard kit to displace an incumbent GEO operator.

2) ATG is a big piece in the US through GoGo. Europe is up and coming through the European Aviation Network (EAN) from Inmarsat/Deutsch Telecom. I rather suspect that Satellite will displace ATG in North America in the near term but we'll see.

Originally Posted by aerobod
Air Canada has implemented Gogo 2Ku (satelite) on it's widebodies, as opposed to Gogo ATG (cellular) that is used on the Delta and United narrowbody fleet and some of the AC narrowbodies. Gogo 2Ku uses many of the same satellites as Panasonic Ku used by WestJet. To a given aircraft, the streaming capability is limited by the satellite receiver. Most of the WestJet receivers should have been upgraded to the 100Mbps+ units (typically up to 400Mbps for v3 units compared with the initial 20Mbps v1 units) that are similar to what Air Canada is or has installed to use the latest Inmarsat satellites.

The limit on streaming will be more based on cost, as most trans-oceanic satellites will cost about USD$0.10 to USD$0.20 per megabyte of transfer, or about USD$150 to stream a 1GB movie.
Air Canada has GoGo 2Ku on widebodies. It ain't bad for general browsing and working, in my experience. I've not tried streaming. It's been a while but my WJ Gogo 2KU was sort of comparable experience.
I don't believe AC is using Inmarsat.

The challenge for any Satellite connectivity to an aircraft is providing a big enough pipe. Very High Throughput Satellites (VHTS) are coming that will improve the ability to do this, but currently, performance is really predicated on the fact that only a fraction of the 300 or so people on a widebody actually plan to use the internet at the same time. Consumer pricing is engineered to make that unlikely - i.e. its too expensive for the masses. When capacity increases then I expect pricing to fall.
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Old Dec 17, 2019, 2:54 am
  #29  
 
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Originally Posted by AtlanticXpat
Couple of observations:

1) Commercially operating LEO constellations (SpaceX, OneWeb) are 3-4 years away. Forget the hype, there are significant technical difficulties in getting mobility working effectively for LEO megaconstellations. And that's without addressing the need to replace that $300k of onboard kit to displace an incumbent GEO operator.

2) ATG is a big piece in the US through GoGo. Europe is up and coming through the European Aviation Network (EAN) from Inmarsat/Deutsch Telecom. I rather suspect that Satellite will displace ATG in North America in the near term but we'll see.



Air Canada has GoGo 2Ku on widebodies. It ain't bad for general browsing and working, in my experience. I've not tried streaming. It's been a while but my WJ Gogo 2KU was sort of comparable experience.
I don't believe AC is using Inmarsat.

The challenge for any Satellite connectivity to an aircraft is providing a big enough pipe. Very High Throughput Satellites (VHTS) are coming that will improve the ability to do this, but currently, performance is really predicated on the fact that only a fraction of the 300 or so people on a widebody actually plan to use the internet at the same time. Consumer pricing is engineered to make that unlikely - i.e. its too expensive for the masses. When capacity increases then I expect pricing to fall.
Yes, the digital fractal antennas are a necessary part of LEO cluster/mesh systems as opposed to mechanical steering antennas. They are available pretty well in prototype form at the moment and allow digital beam steering up to a lower elevation for the same gain compared with mechanical systems, but typically multiple antennas would be used as they are solid state and only about 2cm thick. Rapid satellite lock or pre-lock with multiple antennas can allow millisecond level as opposed to tens of seconds of switching between satellites and tracking at high angular transition rates is not a problem.

i would say 3-4 years is too aggressive for introduction of LEO on commercial aircraft (but realistic for business aircraft). More likely 5-10 years to overcome certification and refresh cost issues.
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Old Dec 17, 2019, 8:56 am
  #30  
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Posted today:

https://thepointsguy.com/news/high-s...-canada-rouge/

High-speed internet now available on Air Canada Rouge



Air Canada has finished rolling out high-speed satellite-based wifi on all aircraft that fly for its Rouge subsidiary.

With the new service, passengers should be able to stream movies and TV shows on sites like YouTube and Netflix, according to the airline.

“We are excited to now offer fast, reliable wi-fi options onboard all Rouge aircraft for the increasing numbers of customers seeking connectivity when flying,” Andrew Yiu, Air Canada’s vice president, product said in a statement.

Prices to connect to the Rouge Wi-Fi network start at $8.50 Canadian

...

The full Air Canada mainline fleet should have the same connectivity early next year. The airline’s narrow-body fleet is already equipped, as are all of its Boeing 777s and most 787s and Airbus A330s, according to the airline.


I love all of the technical info being shared in this post — interesting (although much is admittedly over my head). My challenge: from what some have said here, WestJet’s wifi is no worse than anyone else’s. But my experience on my Windows laptop, as I mentioned above, is consistently great and reliable on DL and UA and consistently poor and unreliable on WS.
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