SoroSuub1

I feel like I have a million cards at this point with free Boingo included..... think it's time to register a Boingo account with each one of them.

NoahVail

I have two WEMCs, used Boingo this past week on my Swoop YXX-YHM (non-737 MAX) flight. I have Boingo set up on both cards, but only seem to remember to use one of them. Next trip post-March 9 I'll try the other to see if they can be tandemed. Not sure if there will be a countdown counter on the accounts, so you know your remaining balance. Will have to check post-March 9.

YYCguy

Is there another way to access Internet on Westjet other than Boingo, or is that the only game in town?

cirrusdragoon

Or one just pays.

FlyerJ

I don’t know where WestJet wifi fits in the grand scheme of airline wifi, but it’s not good.

It’s often crazy slow - like 90s AOL dial-up slow - and often even the most basic web pages won’t load. It cuts out frequently, even when not crossing a border or an ocean. And it’s expensive. I’d regularly use it (or try to) with the MasterCard benefit. Now that it’s been dialled back so much, I don’t see paying the high price for full flight access … not with how their Internet typically performs.

Delta, by comparison, has typically great quality wifi — and it’s now free. And I believe even bottom-of-the-barrel AC Rouge now has super fast wifi that even supports streaming video.

JJonahJ

I thought that Boingo is just a subscription service that "pays" for your onboard WiFi access, otherwise you can pay and get WiFi with a credit card. So is it Boingo that is slow, or is it due to the underlying WiFi that is provided by the carrier/aircraft type? i.e. the actual WiFi service itself.

cirrusdragoon

Westjet subscribes with Panasonic satellite and WS chooses the speed at which their clients receive, they can certainly choose a high bandwidth option but it truly depends how much they want to spend with their provider. Much like a user can choose different home wifi packages ie Vodophone , Orange etc.

JJonahJ

Thanks for the educational lesson. I'm not an experienced on-board WiFi user, so I don't see this layer of information under the hood.

aerobod

Other things to consider in using the different types of In-Flight Internet connectivity:

- Ku geostationary satellites (the system Westjet uses) - highest latency (500ms+), highest coverage, only option for full over-ocean coverage at the moment
- Ka geostationary satellite - highest bandwidth, limited over-ocean coverage
- LEO satellite (future from a commercial airline perspective) - fairly low latency, potential for global coverage
- Ground-based cellullar - lowest latency, similar experience to 4G cellullar, no over-ocean coverage

The experience with geostationary satellite systems can be poor due to the over 0.5 second speed of light delay when using applications that require synchronous packet turnaround, (i.e. 1990s modem like), but is fine for websites and apps that are asynchronous from a packet turnaround perspective. Most common synchronization issues are caused by using VPN tunnels, reverse proxy servers, 3rd party anonomising sites, applications such as Citrix (or other remote terminal emulators) or applications with character echo.

Personally I have found the WS Panasonic system to give decent speed and coverage on transatlantic trips for most of the websites and apps I use.

FlyerJ

A case of YMMV, I suppose. It's been consistently pretty poor performance for me -- and that's just over continental North America. Most 'laptop' things I do really struggle with WS WiFi, but - to your point - that might be more because of my set-up and what I'm trying to do. Basic webmail and web browsing is more functional, although often painfully slow.

aerobod

If you have a corporate laptop that requires a VPN login, it will perform very poorly over satellite links. If the VPN client can be disabled, it will likely improve things a lot, as long as DNS servers are not still pointing to corporate resources. Even web browsing on a corporate laptop with a VPN will normally route the connection via the VPN then out to the Internet instead of direct to the site and if it doesn't, DNS queries are still routed via an active VPN, giving a slow page load due to slow DNS resolution of all the embedded advertising, analytics, etc in most web pages. Sometimes it is impossible to get a corporate laptop to work well over satellite links due to the VPN and DNS configuration.

Microsoft Office 365 in general is slow over satellite links (compared with, for example Google Office), as there seem to be quite a lot of synchronous components, more like a client-server application implemented via a web browser, Outlook desktop client for mail generally performs better than O365 Outlook web client, as it is asynchronously loading mail.

Error 601

I was able to connect to my former employer's Cisco VPN (L2TP over IPSec) just fine and in our environment DNS was routed through the tunnel - although I was more interested in accessing intranet resources than the internet. I was genuinely surprised just how well it worked.

Of course you also have the IP Address Roach Motel problem: https://scamalytics.com/ip/205.220.128.102

A few of my VPN connections got some red lights flashing either due to IP reputation or GeoIP data.