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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.
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.
Everything is awesome and no one is happy!
---don't make me break out my red pen.
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.
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.
I didn't added QoS into my original post. If you VPN into work or home you can remove their ability to filter or tag your connections through a VPN. By tunneling everything through a VPN it would be a true test since anyone with a clue will set crypto traffic with a high priority on a border network.
If it's still unusable it will be due to errors on the transmission, which with tcp would be classed as slowness. With UDP it would be missing packets that are not re-transmitted.
An analogy, in quake w/ tcp code you would hump a wall when lagged, but with udp you would teleport through the wall.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
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.
This, so much this.
Flight time is quiet time, for god's sake leave the phone alone or I might just kill you. Trust me, I already hate you enough for having the audacity to get up to use the bathroom, for smelling of *anything* and for claiming rights to the middle armrest between our seats. If you start yakking away I can't be responsible for my actions. Now have fun with your internets but PLEASE shut the hell up.