First Look: Virgin America’s Inflight Broadband

As noted in my previous post, I had the privilege to be one of the first people to test out Virgin America‘s new inflight Wifi last weekend on a special test flight over San Francisco.

I got a chance to put the service through its paces – trying things like VoIP, email, chat, video, etc. Read on for my full review and some more pictures.

Overall, I was very impressed with the service. Log on was a breeze, just connect to the gogoinflight SSID, enter your details and create a username for future use, enter a credit card number or promo code, and you’re connected to the internet at broadband speeds. I got speeds up to 2 Mb/s down and 512 kb/s up when only a few others were using the service, but the speed dropped dramatically when everyone else on the flight was trying to watch videos at once. Latency was fine for pretty much everything (including SSH sessions), but I’m not sure I’d try to play games on the service. I didn’t see much in the way of dropped packets or other errors.

I tried a few test calls to friends and family on the ground, using my VoIP telephony setup and a softphone on my laptop. Call quality for the most part was good, although people said it was hard to hear me (probably because I was using my laptop’s built in microphone instead of a headset.

Email worked well – I could send and receive emails without any problems. In fact, halfway through the flight, I received the official Virgin America press release about the event, which was sent by someone else on the plane. IM and IRC chat worked flawlessly as well, I was able to make friends on the ground jealous.

I tried to stream video live from my TiVo using my Slingbox, which worked decently, but not great. There were some stutters and freezes, but overall the audio and video were very usable. The same goes for Hulu, YouTube, and other streaming video sites.

I also had a chance to check out a variety of different websites, such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Wikipedia, Flightaware, various airline and hotel sites, and even some “adult” websites. All worked perfectly without any firewall or content restrictions. Browsing websites felt fast, just as fast as using a DSL or cable connection on the ground.

The first plane (N638VA) is already flying around with the service enabled, and it will be available on the entire Virgin America fleet by the Spring of 2009. The cost is $9.95/flight for flights under 3 hours, and $12.95/flight for flights over that length. You can see where the Wifi-enabled planes are currently located by visiting http://wifitracker.virginamerica.com/