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I doubt you would have bandwidth cap or speed limit even you have VPN. Be considerate for other passengers.
"Download to watch/listen" is way to go. Or Otherwise enjoy their in-flight entertainment (usually most airlines offer)
Interesting the planes I have been on that have the faster 100mbps uplinks actually advertise streaming video with it.
Forget internet, as long as the plane isn't falling you should be happy.
Intersting...the major US domestics specifically say their wifi will not work with streaming - e.g. gogo, ipass, etc. Which airlines are you referring to? Just curious.
The planes that are equipped with gogo 2ku: https://www.gogoair.com/commercial/inflight-systems/2ku/
I know at least delta and american support it in the US (though not every plane has it yet). A few of my planes on my trip to hawaii had it.
The ones that feed of the ground supplied 4G might have the capability, but that wouldn’t work over the ocean.
The satellite one above is actually quite interesting.
Actually your post reminded me that like Virgin West-Coast Trains some airlines now hold an on-board drive with movies, TV series and you download an app to connect and obviously they find it more efficient for patient entertainment then letting people use YouTube etc
I downloaded a bunch of SLR camera tutorial videos from YouTube to my laptop before a flight to Thailand, and plugged in to the electrical outlet at the seat. Worked great. Used the knowledge to take great photos on my vacation!
In before @Clouvider tells you that you broke your contract with YouTube by "downloading" content you were supposed to stream.
Gogo is fucking shit. (good luck streaming lol)
Last time I used it, I got:
Yea the old tech sucks. New stuff is not too bad honestly. I was streaming youtube and twitch.
Oh, this post is full of gems, it isn't even funny.
When they mean 100mbps satellite for the entire plane, it probably means for every single plane in a geographic area that has the gear to transmit and receive data on.
Imagine having hundreds of aircraft in the area, and all of them having at least a dozen people who's paid for in flight Wi-Fi access. Yep, that shared 100 meg bandwidth will be saturated so quick it isn't even funny. You'll understand why streaming on a commercial flight isn't feasible for the reasons above.
Yes, I know a few companies are working on using LTE as a backhaul to mostly solve the issue of bandwidth by using small cells and hopefully it'll be available in the future so people can stream once we figure out the other part on getting large amounts of bandwidth delivered efficiently.
Do what others have said here, get a book or get your media offline and enjoy your fight.
Or find an airline that provides a WiFi network that can stream media stored locally on board the aircraft.
@TriJetScud
Some airlines offer good in flight WiFi -- namely those with new satellite technology on board.
Disclaimer: Well, if you consider 3 Mbit/s good anyway with horrendous 1+ second latency.
That's what I have at home and it is indeed good. I wouldn't mind something faster for big downloads, but streaming is fine.
Streamed the content at 0 feet, played from "enhanced cache" (aka hard drive) at 32,000 feet while on the go!
Some people view a few hours of unreachability to be a blessing rather than an ordeal...
But, but...
No experience with US carriers, but on my usual Europe - Asia trips I have mixed experiences. Best WiFi so far was on Cathay Pacific A359, but it ain't cheap. Emirates A380 is somewhat free, but "limited" at best. Expect regional hickups and fluctuations, particularly over Russia in all cases. Either way, I would just feel bad for burning too much data on in-flight WiFi, especially since downloading stuff in advance isn't too much of a hassle.
Also VPNs do not always work even if you pay, Shadowsocks on port 443 is your friend. If you're very desperate and need some minor messaging, try tunneling through DNS - iodine is the way to go, but it's very very very slow. However, it surprisingly works with a lot of paid hotspots all over the world, not just on planes.
CX's A350's come with the latest satellite tech anyways, so I'm not surprised that it performs pretty well compared to other airliners.
After all, Airbus did pull a 8+ hour stress test with their employees pretty much (ab)using the aircraft as a passenger.
The ideas here are fascinating.
100Mbit is a dream over oceans, the in-light fast wifi you see in Europe and Asia is NOT SAT BASED, it uses a targeted LTE system which is unavailable over oceans.
http://www.aviationtoday.com/2017/11/17/firsthand-look-smartskys-4g-lte-flight-connectivity/
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/european-telecoms-set-to-launch-inflight-lte-powered-wi-fi-network/
The Sat systems are what you see in US for example.... 3Mbit, sometimes 5Mbit, shared depending on what sat band used and how many flights are within the same spot. The LTE based systems have far less restrictions and offer 250Mbit+ with near seamless handover.
KU Band does ~12Mbit on first gen tech and up to ~120Mbit on high power second gen (which is limited coverage/not fully deployed) - the BW is shared by all within one beam which can be as large as a country depending on angle/sat used.
KA Band is newer and does better, with 25-75Mbit - Inmarsat offers this and the main difference is ~ doubled frequency from KU (12-18 vs. 25-40 Ghz). This is also shared, but the beams are smaller overall.
Now the reality is way different to this already bad theoretical numbers - depending on angle, sat used, and capacity available on downlink/spot/beam you end up with 10Mbit on a high end system.
This 10Mbit, unshared & flatrate, will cost you 5000-50000$ per month.
Now you know why in-flight wifi is limited, sat tech is very complex and cannot keep up with ground based technology and the distance to anything fiber or even microwave (~200km) connectable to use as LTE uplink point are practically nil over the pacific/atlantic.
https://www.gilat.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/KaVsKu.pdf - Gilat is a large Israeli telco specialised in sat internet (mostly as upstream for other ISPs)
https://corpblog.viasat.com/viasats-new-ku-band-advanced-internet-ups-the-game-for-speed-on-business-jets/
http://concourse.gogoair.com/capacity-debate-ku-vs-ka-band-connectivity/
http://www.intelsat.com/global-network/satellites/epicng/ - Intelsat offers high power KU band services in some regions
https://www.inmarsat.com/service/global-xpress/ - Inmarsat offers practically global KA band services among others
Most of time Iodine will always work,but it hella slow,
it is dns we talking about
Well, that is just selfish. how long is your flight, 8-12 hours? why don't you just pick a few books and read?
some people are just damn selfish.
Don't know about other VPN services but I can share my experience with plains. I'm using shitvpn for a few years and it works great if you know the product a little more. Firstly, it depends what device you're using: on Windows/Android/macOS OpenVPN version you need to switch on TCP and Obfuscated servers, macOS IKEv2 - download OpenVPN version, on iOS you need to set up OpenVPN and use TCP. If it still doesn't work.. sorry, plane network engineers did a great job prohibiting the VPN from users. Just joking, if it still doesn't work contact their support - they helped me before. Also they gave me a discount code imashill for sharing with friends, don't know if I can post it in here but maybe will be helpful for someone
Shit adversting.
Fixed the ad.
Says the guy that looks for ways to abuse the system ;-).
>
I'm curious, when people come here making fake reports and posts, mods/admins tend to edit it like this: "I come from shit provider, and our services are shit" with the provider name being ommited and the post looking obviously modified.
What is the objective exactly? It's fun? Because if the objective is to give bad SEO to the spammy provider, then wouldn't it be more effective to make the post look like a legit negative review?
Back on topic.
Travelling a lot back and forth between the EU and HK, internet access at 35k feet is a great perk which I very much enjoy using. It's slow, but sufficeint for E-Mails/Tickets/SSH and messaging. I personally consider anyone hogging all the bandwidth just so they can watch a shit quality Youtube video to be a douche move, and borderline theft if they are actively trying to bypass restrictions imposed to ensure quality access for all.
If it cost $50k /month for 100Mbit, then that works out to be about $1.6 per GB of data transfer assuming the 100Mbit line was fully hammered 24/7.
Personally, when up in the air, I would probably consider dial speeds (if stable) to be a reasonable cap. No one should be doing anything media heavey...
Not enough data to say wether this is an employee of the provider in question. If they were, I wouldn't omit the name.
Fair enough.
Tried PIA and VyperVPN on the plane, VyperVPN chameleon constantly disconnected while PIA stayed up depending on server. Both on TCP 443.
This was on Finnair A350 plane. Connection was satelite and my bandwidth was 50-1300 Kbps which was the same as without VPN.