I’m off to visit my wife & in-laws in Wilmington, NC for a July 4th weekend vacation & decided to try something new. I’m writing this post from 30,000 feet aboard a Delta Airlines flight en-route to Atlanta & must say, I am pretty impressed with the in-flight Internet access I am just now checking out for the first time.
After a quick registration process on a sign-up page & charging 0.95c to my credit card, I am now online for the duration of the flight. As far as the service, it has worked very well for me. Since shortly after takeoff, I have successfully:
- checked work email,
- checked the flight status to grab the image you see here,
- sent an SMS message to my wife using the very cool Google Voice, and
- written this post – all without any issues.
For the business traveller, this seems like a must-have to keep up with the office while between airports.
For leisure travelers, this service may seem a bit pricey, especially if you’re traveling on a multi-leg itinerary as you would need to pay the .95 for each flight, or buy a package for 30 days (which would seem to pay off if you have a few trips coming up, all on the same Wi-Fi-enabled carrier).
To test out the download speeds, I logged into iTunes & bought the new “Killers” album & was quite pleased with the time needed to complete the download — it was pretty quick & not that much slower than the broadband connection you might have at home. (For the technies, I was getting approximately 200kb/second).
Upload speed was noticeably slower. For most Wi-Fi fliers I wouldn’t expect this to be an issue though unless you’re uploading photos from your trip on the flight home, which I don’t think I would recommend.
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