cirrusdragoon

It most likely due to the fact WestJet does not pay for more bandwidth. It is very clear that yes you can have fast reliable speeds with satellite connectivity in order for example to stream netflix. The airline just needs to spend the money to allow for this.

aerobod

Many individual WestJet Connect users in the past have transferred over 1GB of data in a 4 hour flight from the logs I reviewed a couple of years ago, with a high of 6GB on a 10hr flight. The old Gen 1 modems (which by now should already have been replaced with the up to 400 Mbps Gen 3 modems) were capable of 20Mbps per aircraft. It depends on the number of concurrent users and the real-time availability of bandwidth on a given satellite (which is shared between all providers using the same satellites, whether it is Panasonic or Gogo). WestJet doesn’t buy bandwidth at all, Panasonic fully manages the Internet service for them, as it does for United Ku (not ATG), Emirates, etc, over the same links and ground stations.

Most airlines have the provider block streaming services explicitly at the moment as they don’t generally use efficient video codecs (that may change with general availability of MPEG-5), JetBlue has been an exception in the past due to the nature of the Ka satellite spot beams they used over the Continental US, but that bandwidth wasn’t available in most other places, so has not been used by airlines who fly over much water.

lsquare

I suspect in-flight internet will really take off once Elon Musk completes his satellite constellation. It's going to have global coverage. I suspect latency will be much better. I don't expect any of us to be using that technology until mid-decade at the earliest.

lsquare

It's interesting that you mentioned DL. I'm assuming DL uses Gogo ATG rather than satellite for North American flights? I have never used satellite internet so I can't compare. I recently flew out of ATL on DL and I used Gogo. It was ok at best. I'm not sure if it's fast enough to stream Netflix. I mostly browsed the web and used messaging on that flight. It still doesn't feel very snappy compared to using Wifi on the ground or even the LTE network if that makes any sense. I can somewhat feel the lag. It's better than nothing though.

YYCguy

From what I understand, WS is working towards upgrading their soft/hardware to hopefully fix the issues that have been happening with laptop access to internet. Streaming services such as Netflix are discouraged on WS Connect Internet but I’m sure people don’t care and do it anyways, thereby making the experience poor for other people that have work to get done.

aerobod

Although there are many streaming sites that can be accessed, streaming will be spotted through the data stream characteristics and increasingly severe limits are placed on bandwidth use that affects other users, this is basically applied at the ground station by Panasonic’s network management software.