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Virgin American In-Flight Internet Review, From In-Flight
wintersynth writes "I've posted a review of Virgin America's in-flight internet provided by Gogo. Here's the scoop: Avg. .90 megabits/sec DL, .283 megabits/sec UL, ping: 130.6 msecs, $12.95 for the duration of the flight. Verdict: AWESOME. In fact, I'm posting this from 36,000 feet right now. Skype did not work for voice, even though I'm pretty sure those stats are over the minimums. Any ideas from the slashdotters on what might be going on?"
You could be experiencing a difference of bandwidth versus latency. Although the two are related, you could be suffering high latency with Skype's servers. You might try pinging those servers compared to pinging www.google.com. If you are experiencing high latency, Skype uses UDP rather than TCP (like normal web traffic). If I remember correctly, UDP packets are many small packets which may perform badly over connections of very high latency. Your bandwidth readings on a TCP sight might look just large enough to use Skype but since it's a UDP service it could be unusable.
Another possibility is that Gogo is demoting UDP traffic in some sort of QoS scheme to ensure that things like e-mail and regular HTTP traffic aren't slow or interrupted because 4 people are using Skype.
My work here is dung.
Probably blocked everything VoIP related to force airphones on you.
I tried dialing the Skype test call, but I only caught every other word. So much for my dreams of in-flight video conferencing while yelling over the din of jet engines.
Oh god, I hope you, nor anyone else, ever gets this to work.
Yes,
You need to watch this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jETv3NURwLc
Everything is awesome and no one is happy!
---don't make me break out my red pen.
We don't want to hear you talking on the phone while flying, and neither does Virgin.
Logically, they likely blocked it in order to preserve the sanity of other passengers.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Maybe I'm just insufficiently wealthy, or insufficiently internet addicted; but is 13 dollars for what is essentially five hours of DSL actually exciting?
A traceroute to (anything) would have been very interesting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jETv3NURwLc
---don't make me break out my red pen.
Probably blocked everything VoIP related to force airphones on you.
From the article:
I'm trying to get some critical production tasks done, and the rep I work with emailed me to call her. Thinking I was so tricky and cool, I fired up Skype and dialed out. Massive failure. For some reason the sound is horrendously choppy and thin sounding. It was completely unusable. I didn't get a chance to speak and see how I sounded on the other end. I tried dialing the Skype test call, but I only caught every other word.
Sounds like he could connect, it was just choppy.
My work here is dung.
Joining American Airlines, Virgin America has demoed its in-flight Gogo broadband service. Official policy for Virgin Airlines is to block VoIP parts, but, rather than just let sleeping dogs lie, it seems to be a rite of passage for tech media wonks to demo work-around as they write about their experiences. From: http://www.fiercevoip.com/story/no-voip-blocking-virgin-america-beta-voip-holes-aa/2008-11-23
Let me be the first to welcome you to the Mile High Virgin Club.
Ezekiel 23:20
Any ideas from the slashdotters on what might be going on?
No. Is there anything else I can help you with?
Edith Keeler Must Die
Any ideas from the slashdotters on what might be going on?
It's the "block the VOIP" feature which tested much more positively than "kill the annoying guy on the phone" with focus groups.
You might want to try to vpn into work or home, then try to use Skype. Chances are they filtering what ports are allowed, so going through a crypto tunnel will remove this ability.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
...you can send wave file samples and receive them as "packets" using the record button. Start with this 2 way radio approach to talking and see where you can go from there.
If there is a god in the sky, voip will stay blocked.
I can't imagine sitting around someone who is talking incessantly on a phone on an airplane.
I don't care to listen to my own family members talk on a telephone for any length of time.
Normally I ascribe all life to intelligent design, but in your case I'll make an exception.
No, screaming brats are NOT okay. But the only proven method for shutting them up tends to be frowned upon in most legal circles. However, the constant nattering of someone on the phone does not need to be added to the situation. I fail to see how VoIP and screaming kids are even close to analogous. There's factors such as "kid's ticket was paid for, person being chatted with did not purchase ticket." Thus, it's in their interests to keep things as quiet as possible for the people who have actual tickets.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
I was an early adopter of WAN wireless internet in my area. While reasonable download speeds *could* be achieved on average the latency was terrible. Essentially the latency of data traversing the cellphone networks with some proprietary transmission protocol was unavoidable, since these networks were never designed for Teh Internets. Indeed you don't really notice 200-300ms of unstable latency when you're on a mobile call, but you do when your trying to shunt data over it the same network. All up, I had a 5mbps connection where a minimum latency floor of 300-350ms to local servers was the norm. These days with new GPRS through to HSDPA or whatever, things are a bit better.
The same with something in flight internet.
I would have been more interested in your pings to Google.com I bet they would have been rubbish.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Southwest is testing Wi-Fi on four of its planes now. I was on one on a flight from Las Vegas to Baltimore. They sent me an email the day before telling me that the plane would have wi-fi and that it would be free during this test period.
The speed was fantastic, but I didn't benchmark it. However, I was able to do a video iChat with my wife at home. Didn't try to do any audio, just video.
The big drawback about Southwest is that their planes have no power outlets. Not sure if they're going to add them. But they're aware of the issue.
Skype worked for me over hughesnet from the middle of missouri. That network has serious latency issues.
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."
Asterisk 1.4+ has a jitter buffer for at least IAX and SIP which helps to work around jitter in most cases. Given that they know what they're doing, I assume Skype does too.
Jitter is (relatively) okay, it's packet loss that VoIP is particularly sensitive to. Packet loss at levels that will only mildly inconvenience most other traffic will screw up VoIP quite badly... there's no mention of packet loss in the article that I see, but I suspect that's what's causing the poor quality.
I've been working as a contractor for Aircell, the company behind the network, and it is not satellite, except for a few points. The network is 100 cell phone towers to T1 to internet. Max bandwidth is 3Mb. And yes VoIP is blocked for obvious reasons.
For more info, check out aircell.com.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.