WestJet inflight WiFi needs to be better
 

WestJet has gotten so much right recently (and made so many significant changes in recent months) ... it’s quite impressive.

The one thing that needs to be updated and improved (well, other than the lack of recognition or reciprocal benefits on DL :p ) is their on-board Internet. It stinks. When trying to use it in a laptop, it rarely functions for me.

Oddly, Panasonic’s service works ok when I connect my iPhone, but on a laptop, it’s finicky and awful and often so slow that it’s pointless. While it’s fine for doing a few emails from my phone, getting actual work done on my laptop is nearly impossible. It’s just a bad system.

Meanwhile, I almost always use both Delta’s and United’s wifi. What a difference. Both actually work, are glitch free, have quite good speeds. (That also leads me to believe that it’s not user error. On other airlines, it all works perfectly well for me.)

Panasonic Aero (or whatever it’s called on WestJet) just plain stinks. Time to switch to more current technology with one of the known inflight wifi brands.

Canadian businesses are in dire economical condition and while raising their rates they cut services and they are not even accountable to the corrupt government. So I will not be surprised if I wake up and hear WestJet has filed for bankruptcy protection...which means ripping customers and asking courts to support the loot...:D

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.

This presents a problem to a lot of business applications that use LAN and WAN based networking techniques that are latency intolerant such as:
- any VPN
- fat clients such as Outlook, any SQL database connector, any Java client
- any application that uses character echo (usually exhibited by typing being ahead of the character displayed)
- Citrix, VDI, Xen desktop and any applications run in them.
Web based applications may have an initial brief delay when loading on satellite systems, but then load at a similar rate to ATG systems. Use apps or true asynchronous web based applications for better performance over satellite systems.

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.

You sure you weren't sleeping when you wrote this?

Interesting explanation aerobod — thanks! I fully admit I’m not a tech-savy person (beyond knowing how to connect to inflight wifi, I have no clue how it works!).

Im intrigued ... Air Canada now claims that they have “streaming” speed wifi on their wide body fleet, fast enough to support streaming video, and it works internationally. My understanding is that they use Gogo. How do they make that work?

With WestJet, my challenge is that their wifi is almost always an awful user experience to connect, and then an unreliable product once connected. Your tech explanation is helpful, but doesn’t change the issue that they’re selling something that doesn’t work all that well.

Drinking or high or trolling . . .

Net profit at Westjet was 120 million in the last quarter alone, and about to be taken private by Onex, who frankly don't make a lot of bad investment decisions (though there's a few in there along the way)
While we are probably headed to a recession courtesy of our American neighbours IMO, dire economical condition it is not, at the moment.

Back on topic; I think it's a nice thing to have good internet, but I fly a lot with United (70 segments this year) and i can tell you it does not always work well, actually (I fly on CRJ 900's, Airbus 3xx series, 737's and ERJ's and they're all similar). Really would say that at the moment most tech is just good for messaging. That is improving, and Westjet should keep up, but I don't think it's fair to say what they have isn't competitive. Having said that I rarely fly Westjet; but did want to comment on the vs. United comparison the OP made.

The latest gen Gogo internet Ku band satellites are suitable for streaming. Streaming isn't latency sensitive - in other words, if your video is 1 or 2 seconds behind no problem. You need bandwidth (ie mbps) for streaming, but latency (ms per packet of information to go from you to the satellite to the ground then back) doesn't really matter.

Real time synchronous connections (and in fact Outlook is a horribly talkative app, FYI) are where you notice that kind of thing impacting performance. VOIP is another example that doesn't do well on high latency connections (at all) unless tuned carefully and even then it's noticeable.

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.

Or when he advised the masses that window seats are the worst seats vs. middle ones, which of course are the best.

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I'll pay WS a reasonable fee for in-flight WiFi.....when it works on a Mac Laptop. Right now it doesn't.

ws , they need to invest more money on their product. panasonic can work better if the client pays more .

Internet access via wifi works fine on a Mac (and any other device that can access the Internet with a browser), it is the free streaming of on-aircraft movies via wifi that doesn't work properly due to the DRM issues.

Many people use 'Internet access' and 'wifi' interchangeably, wifi is the wireless network connectivity to a wireless access point with or without access to the Internet, so they are not directly synonymous with each other.

Why not just make a Mac build of the iOS app using Catalyst?

Our developers had usable Mac builds of a few of our internal applications in a matter of hours.

In any event, if you don't mind keeping an ancient version of Chrome in your applications folder you can make the existing plug-in work.

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.

Yep. I conflated the two. My mistake WS IFE Doesn't work on a Mac. Someone somewhere posted a horrendously complicated workaround, which in effect - to me - means it doesn't work.