Virgin Wifi
Asides
I’m on a Virgin America flight from Las Vegas to San Francisco and there’s wifi! I was on one of the test international flights where they did wifi like 5 years ago but I haven’t been on a flight that has had it since. I wish this flight was actually longer. I’m getting 140ms ping times to wordpress.com, it’s a great connection.
140ms — indeed a great connection with relatively low latency. I am getting higher ping to WordPress.com than that! Although I am on the other side of the planet
Need more details!
Costs? Speed? Bandwidth? (speedtest.net)
Anyone else using it?
I paid I think $10 for the flight. For Las Vegas to San Francisco that felt expensive, for anything longer than 3 hours I’d be alright with that.
I hope you meant that you paid $10 extra for the Internet access on the flight, and not $10 for the whole plane ticket.
We’re not getting that ripped off by the cost of plane tickets in Australia, are we?
Haha yes.
It’s about time the airlines woke up.
EMI from consumer electronic devices has been proven time and time again to not affect airplane electronics. These days, the cable shielding is designed to withstand it.
Appears they’re using EV-DO to get the signal and rebroadcasting over WiFi. At this point, the ban on using laptop Internet access cards seems rather arbitrary.
Richard Branson is my hero. Hopefully Virgin will expand their domestic flights or better yet I hope United and American step to the plate.
Keep it blue.
No Fried Eyes
Great to hear it is working after all the hype it was getting before it went live. Any extra costs in ticket?
It’s funny how they’re cutting back on so many things on airlines now, but are starting to include things like internet…
man, the ISPs in the USA are bogus…we “invent” the internet and yet provide the world’s worst service in high speed internet… booooo
That is always nice to have such great service.
140ms? In an airplane? Jeeze…
Here at home on my DSL connection, I get a 102ms ping to wordpress.com and that’s normal. Stupid interweaving.
I can’t wait until every flight offers wifi! That’s so great!
Wow! That’s cool!
I’m amazed. What a beautiful way not to waste five hours in transit going from one coast to the other. How did they get that past the TSA?
I keep hearing rumors of different airlines testing out WiFi, particularly JetBlue, but I have yet to be on a flight where I can tap into a beta.
It’s something I’ve always been weary of though. Having WiFi could both be a luxury and a security risk, so it’s a tough call to make.
are you serious? 140 MEGABITE PER SECOND? that is unreal!!
broadband in my area would be lucky to get 3 mbps but then irish broadband is shit!
No that was 140 milliseconds in ping time. The bandwidth was actually pretty low, for example I coudln’t do a Skype video chat.