Review: GoGo In-flight Wireless
Rating: 
Site: www.gogoinflight.com
On my flight back from DevCon I was pleasantly surprised that there was GoGo In-flight Wi-Fi service on my American Airlines flight. I paid the $12.95 one time charge to get internet access on the plane and was amazed at the service. The internet access was a bit slow like a Verizon EVDO card but it worked! I was using it on my Macbook for about 3 hours before the battery died. It let me write quite a few articles but Slacker, Pandora, & Last.fm were a bit choppy and kept on cutting out on my laptop.
So once the battery died I fired up my T-Mobile BlackBerry Bold 9700 and used my same login to get back on the the Wi-Fi network by using the Hotspot login feature in the Wi-Fi setup wizard. The connection took a few tries to get working but afterwards it was just plain awesome!!! The coolest part is that GoGo did not charge me yet again to use a different device to connect to the internet. Sadly I did not think of testing out if both my laptop and BlackBerry could be connected at the same time for one charge but I doubt it.
I connected to the Wi-Fi network and within a few seconds I had my latest emails and everything on my BlackBerry. What truly blew my mind is that I even had UMA T-Mobile@Home service in the air! I am not sure how I feel about people making phone calls on a close and cramped airplane but I was shocked that it was not blocked! The audio quality was also great. It was T-Mobile @ 30,000 feet in the sky!
I started playing with the service and found that everything worked like it should. Google Talk, Facebook, and even SMS were working just fine. I then fired up Pandora and decided to try it out. It took a bit for my station to load but after about 30 seconds I was listening to Apologize by OneRepublic though I should have been listening to Stairway to Heaven…
Only one thought came to mind when I had all of this running. “I LOVE Technology!”
So I will end this off by saying that the next time you are on a flight with Wi-Fi give it a shot. The days of boring in-flight entertainment are over. Now if only they would provide us with power jacks or even USB ports to charge gadgets I would be in heaven!
andrewnyc ( View Profile) - Posts: 62
Posted: November 13, 2009 at 4:27 PM EST
Did you actually try to have a voice conversation? I’m curious what kind of delay there would be.
Rick Not Registered
Posted: November 13, 2009 at 7:13 PM EST
I tried this yesterday on my Delta flight. Delta is allowing free trials until the end of the year. It was a little difficult to figure out how to sign up as you had to pick a package. The key was to enter the promo code of trydeltagogo.
I was able to stream my slingbox with no dropouts on my Bold. I posted on websites and listened to wunderradio streaming.
Very pleased and you could get a discount of $7.95 for smart phones. Still pretty expensive for a two hour flight.
Ronen Halevy ( View Profile) - Posts: 3286
Posted: November 14, 2009 at 5:49 PM EST
The person I called said I sounded a little far away but they could hear me. It cut out a few times but didnt disconnect. I tried calling my voicemail to record the audio but I was starting to get people staring at me on the plane…
c0rinne ( View Profile) - Posts: 384
Posted: November 13, 2009 at 7:50 PM EST
Pretty cool.
Ryan Not Registered
Posted: November 16, 2009 at 10:00 AM EST
It felt like an EVDO connection because that’s what GoGo uses for air-ground communications
(it’s a private network though, licensed for air-ground use)