Airplane wifi is a great idea – but it still mostly sucks

After a weekend of debauchery in Las Vegas I was looking forward to catching up on the season finale of Lost on our flight home. Armed with a knapsack of electronic toys and my credit card, i figured the 5 or so hour flight be less painful than usual.

It took me the better part of 20 minutes to register and sign-up for an account on my iPad  – but that was ok by me as i still had plenty of time to watch my 2 hour episode. Thanks to the ABC iPad App i could watch Lost in all its glory. I loaded up the App and unfortunately I was denied service – i was a victim of geo-fencing. I guess the App doesn’t yet recognize the IP address from the US Airways service.

Undeterred, I went to the CTV website as that’s where i usually turn to when my Bell IP TV service fails to record an episode – which is at least twice a month. The site loaded quickly, but there was one problem – with flash not supported on the iPad, i couldn’t watch or stream the episode. Dah.

I finished my second beer and reached for my laptop. After logging in again to the wifi service i went back to the CTV website only for it to geo-fence block me. Double Dah.  Going to the ABC website worked this time and i was able to start the episode. Strange that both devices working on the same wifi service had opposite outcomes!

At this point I was a full hour into my flight and was ready to go. There was only one problem – the wifi connection was painfully slow – around 290kps for uploading and 936kps for downloading (according to my speed test App on my iPad) – or WAY too slow to watch streaming video.

Three hours into my flight I had managed to watch all of 10 minutes of my 2 hour episode and finally decided to give up on the whole experience and seek out another beer instead.

The connection is fast enough if all you are doing is checking email & browsing the web, but streaming audio or video seems slower & worse than dial-up used to be.

This was my first experience having the interweb on a flight and I’ll take the slow connection for email and basic browsing over having nothing at all, but for $12.95 USD I was expecting much better value.

I guess I’ll have to wait until I get home tonight to find out what happened in the series finale -  I’m hoping that the sequel to my airline wifi experience will be just as good.