1. Your last bastion of Internet Free peace is gone. Forever. You’ll be forced to work on flights instead of valium napping or reading comic books, and your boss will expect you to be checking email. Time to plan a camping trip.
2. Total bandwidth is not as fast as Cable Modem, but it seems faster than slow DSL. (We were sharing 3.6Mbps down and 1.8Mbps up, which isn’t bad at all, on this Virgin America test flight, and it felt this fast when benching.)
3. But bandwidth is shared between customers. Aircell’s GoGo a 3GHz EVDO-Rev A related tech modded for ground to air, started crawling as soon as other passengers signed on. (I got a test result measuring 66kbps down at one point, but Ryan showed about a mbit down. )
4. You have to pay. Virgin America charges, for example $US9.95 for flights under 3 hours, and $US12.95 on flights over 3 hours.
5. You will still need to close your laptops and shut off your devices until you reach cruising altitude.
6. Most airlines, even those that are not blocking ports, are blocking known VOIP ports. For our sanity. Although I WAS able to initiate a really solid iChat video session, but they may filter this on real flights. (See Below, courtesy of Nick Bilton from the NYTimes.)
7. Although plenty of airlines will have Wi-Fi by the end of next year, I prefer Virgin America because they’ve got 110v AC power plugs in coach.
8. WiFi porn won’t be blocked by Virgin America or American Airlines (according to a test earlier this week.) But blocking porn is silly — people can easily play porn on DVDs or predownloaded files, but people generally have refrained so there’s no reason to think they’ll do otherwise now.
9. Flights using Go Go service will be able to connect to a VPN.
10. You can file share with other computers on the 802.11 a/b/g Wi-Fi network. That’s good for gaming, but also, make sure your firewall is up.

Most of this applies to Virgin and GoGo’s set up, but since GoGo will be providing service for companies like Delta and AA and eventually more, much of this will apply to other airlines.

Hunched over his MacBook in coach “like a T-Rex,” Siler was able to complete a battery of tests. The upload rate wasn’t shabby; 257 Kbps was enough to let him upload a Flickr gallery, for one thing.

Since Speakeasy.net reported a respectable 658 Kbps download speed, it was no surprise that Siler reported A-OK on the all-important mid-flight pornage test. He was able to stream some nice naughty material, as you can see (artfully blacked out by me) in the screengrab above. (That’s Wes, holding his ticket, in the Photo Booth shot next to it.)

The porn access should come as good news for people who fear that other mid-air nemesis, the Chatty Cathy: At least porn will keep some passengers distracted from voice chat, which worked all too well in our quick test. Truth be told, the only thing that didn’t work was video chat—iChat just kept choking and crashing. Hey, something was bound to fail as Siler hurtled through the sky high above Nebraska at an air speed of 935 kilometres per hour.

If you’ve had any interesting in-flight Wi-Fi experiences, by all means share them in comments. [AA; Thanks Wes!]

Update: Here’s how REAL it is—Siler just took a screenshot of this article while in the air and IM’d it to me:

Since the launch of Gogo, American has not experienced any reported incidents of customers viewing inappropriate content via the Gogo service. However, we believe this is an appropriate measure to take.

If they have had no incidents–as expected, just as you don’t hear of many people watching porn in their portable DVD players in a plane–, why give up? What happened to their technical arguments? Is the filtering going to limit web access to legitimate services or not? Most probably, American Airlines will avoid answering those questions.

But besides that, are they going to regulate people looking at porn on their own devices too? What about reading Playboy? Are they going to ban Playboy from flights? And are they going to filter Gizmodo because we post NSFW topless girls covered in oil playing Wii Sports once in a while?

Of course, logical questions like these will probably find no answers from American Airlines either. Religious groups like Focus on the Family, on the other side, would probably love to answer them with axes, pitchforks, and torches.

Another sad day in the history of a country that has defended personal freedom and responsibility as a core value since its very beginning. [Sky talk]

So unhappy that the flight attendant union began putting pressure on American to block porn content on their just-launched service (would you want to be the person to come between some crazy perv and his porn on a cross-country haul? Me neither). Delta is now planning to nip a potential flight attendant strike before things get out of hand. The filter, according to Delta, will be limited only to “sites that few, if any, would question are inappropriate to be viewed on an aircraft.” [Atlanta Journal Constitution via Electronista]

NOTE: Other international airlines have had in-flight net access, but this is the first international to use Aircell’s Gogo service, which is being adopted quickly by US airlines.

Canada’s Largest Airline Selects Aircell’s Gogo Service for Inflight Wi-Fi

(Sept. 9, 2008 – WAEA Conference and Exhibition) – Aircell®, the world’s leading provider of airborne communications, and Air Canada, Canada’s largest airline, today announced that they have reached an agreement, whereby the airline intends to offer the Aircell mobile broadband service, Gogo™, to passengers on trans-border flights expanding Aircell’s North American footprint and making Air Canada the first Canadian airline to offer inflight Wi-Fi.

Under this agreement, Air Canada will roll out the Gogo system on select flights, initially installing the system on its Airbus A319 aircraft that fly across the border into the United States. The airline expects to begin its initial deployment by spring 2009.

The Gogo system on Air Canada’s trans-border routes will be available first in the U.S. and powered by Aircell’s existing U.S. network, making Air Canada’s initial rollout fast, economical and simple. Air Canada and Aircell expect that the Gogo service will eventually provide passengers with seamless coverage from key Air Canada cities such as Montreal and Toronto to every Air Canada market in the continental U.S. Additionally, Aircell looks forward to the licensing and roll out of a Canadian Air-to-Ground network that will facilitate Air Canada’s future fleet-wide deployment.

“Air Canada has long been recognised as a leader in cabin merchandising and we are pleased to have Gogo selected as part of that marketing strategy,” commented Jack Blumenstein, President and CEO, Aircell. “Adding Air Canada as Aircell’s newest airline partner and first international customer will mark yet another milestone for our company. As we continue to grow our U.S. network and explore our international expansion plans, Air Canada will have the distinction of being the first.”

“Air Canada prides itself on connecting Canada and the world and an important element of staying connected today is having use of the Internet. That is why Air Canada is taking a major step forward to becoming the first Canadian airline to provide its customers inflight, online access through Gogo. In cooperation with Aircell, and pending Canadian regulatory approvals, we plan to eventually offer internet access system-wide so customers can email, work and surf the net while flying, and more fully enjoy what is already a superior travel experience,” said Charles McKee, Vice President, Marketing, at Air Canada.

[Photo: Cubbie_n_Vegas]

It is against American’s policy and Gogo’s terms of service to use VoIP. Aircell has multiple protocols and practices in place to prevent the use of VoIP. Obviously, it is extremely difficult to stop every instance of VoIP but Aircell is monitoring and working constantly to enforce American’s policy and Gogo’s terms of service.

It’s a pretty general piece of ass-covering, but I kind of agree. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Any shred of anything that helps preserve the sanity of the air-travelling populace, I’m all for it.

Phweet lets you talk to anyone with a Twitter ID via a Flash-based web interface. This circumvents Aircell’s block on voice and video chats, which is done via the system’s router (Skype calls connect, but drop after 5 seconds or so once the network discovers what you’re up to). Since Phweet disguises itself as any old Flash embed, it gets around the block. I still reserve the right to “accidentally” spill my Bloody Mary and peanuts all over you if you spend the whole flight gabbing to your Twitter friends, though. [VoIP Watch, Laptop, Image: bribriTO]

FORT WORTH, Texas and ITASCA, Ill. – Marking the beginning of the next wireless revolution, American Airlines made history today with the launch of the mobile broadband service, Gogo(tm) provided by Aircell®.

Effective today, customers travelling on American’s Boeing 767-200 aircraft can access complete coast-to-coast coverage on nonstop flights between New York and San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, and New York and Miami. American, the world’s largest airline and founding member of the oneworld® Alliance, and Aircell, the world’s leading provider of airborne communications, have joined together to bring the first full inflight broadband service to the U.S. market.

“We are pleased to provide our customers with the unprecedented ability to stay connected to their family, friends and business associates on the ground via the Internet while travelling at 30,000 feet above the United States,” said Dan Garton, American’s Executive Vice President – Marketing. “With today’s launch, American Airlines makes history as the first and only U.S. airline to offer customers full inflight Internet connectivity, demonstrating once again our industry leadership and focus on our customers.”

Aircell’s Gogo will be available to customers as a fee-based service in all cabins. Aircell will charge $12.95 on flights more than three hours, which include American’s Boeing 767-200 flights. Each paid Gogo session includes full Internet access. Cell phone and Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services are not available.

Gogo turns an American Airlines flight into a Wi-Fi hotspot, enabling passengers to surf the Web, check any email, Instant Message, access a corporate VPN, and more. Once the aircraft has reached 10,000 feet, users can simply turn on their Wi-Fi enabled devices such as laptops, smartphones and PDAs, open their browsers and be directed to the Gogo portal page where they sign up and begin surfing. Gogo is powered by the Aircell air-to-ground (ATG) Broadband System, which runs over Aircell’s exclusive nationwide network.

“Today, U.S. air travel changes forever. With Aircell’s unique ATG inflight Internet service, airlines finally have an economically viable option for providing the broadband connectivity passengers are demanding,” said Jack Blumenstein, President and CEO, Aircell. “American Airlines is the first to bring inflight Internet to market, and today the days of being cut off from the rest of the world while in the air become history.”