Question about inflight wifi

[Easy Mac]

Perhaps out pilotman/frequent travelers can help.

I'm making two 17+ hour flights in the coming month. I'm planning on paying for wifi for the trip to share with my wife. We'll likely use 2-5 devices, depending on battery life and whatnot.

To avoid paying $30 each, I plan to share the wifi, and I was wondering if anyone had recommendations on how. I think I have 3 options, but I'm not sure how well they'll work.

1) Get wifi on my phone, share it to other devices over bluetooth. I've heard this works, but I'm not sure how well.

2) Get wifi on my windows tablet and use a wifi sharing app to share the wifi.

3) Buy a USB travel router to repeat the signal. I've heard they may not allow you to take it on planes though.

Any suggestions?

[panerd]

Originally Posted by Easy Mac

Perhaps out pilotman/frequent travelers can help.

I'm making two 17+ hour flights in the coming month. I'm planning on paying for wifi for the trip to share with my wife. We'll likely use 2-5 devices, depending on battery life and whatnot.

To avoid paying $30 each, I plan to share the wifi, and I was wondering if anyone had recommendations on how. I think I have 3 options, but I'm not sure how well they'll work.

1) Get wifi on my phone, share it to other devices over bluetooth. I've heard this works, but I'm not sure how well.

2) Get wifi on my windows tablet and use a wifi sharing app to share the wifi.

3) Buy a USB travel router to repeat the signal. I've heard they may not allow you to take it on planes though.

Any suggestions?

I'm sorry that I can be of any help but what airline charges $30 a person for wifi? Is it the length of the flight? I have had free wifi and at most $5 on every flight I have been on.

[digamma]

There was an article in the WSJ a couple of days ago about in flight wifi providers. Gogo was the initial market leader and may be your only option, but their product quality has gone way, way down. You may want to check to see who the airline offers. Right now, Gogo is just a completely frustrating experience.

[PilotMan]

Not sure I can answer all of your questions. It's not something that I deal with very much. I can say that I've carried a travel router in my bag for a while with no problems, even when I've been traveling as a regular passenger. I don't know enough about the inner workings of the system to know whether or not a set up like that will even work with the wifi.

One option would be to check out prepaying. You can usually get a better rate by buying ahead. That's not much help I know, sorry.

It's just not something I'm very familiar with.

[Easy Mac]

No worries, just checking opinions.

We're flying EVA Air. I guess its actually $22 for 1 device connected at a time. We could probably get by just alternating which device is online when or just using one device, but there may be a time when we'll want to play on the internet at the same time.

Plus, I like the idea of at least having access to google voice texts, since we're leaving the child behind and I don't want to go 17ish hours without knowing everything is OK. Ideally I'll sleep on the plane since we take off at 1 AM EST, but who knows about that.

[SteveMax58]

My experience with wifi in the air is that its terrible and almost unbearable. It goes from ok if you are one of the first to connect, to wtf shortly after, to ah screw it I'm going to sleep after a while. Hopefully EVA is better but thats been my experience. Just barely tolerable for email, text, and (very) basic websites.

But you could test your bluetooth setup ahead of time. Like right now. It wont show you how frustrating the wifi might be in the air, but it will show you what to expect the impact over bluetooth to be.

[Radii]

I flew American to and from San Diego last week with a layover, so four flights. Both times, I pre-paid early for a $16 "day pass" so I could use it on both flights. Service isn't good, but it was good enough for me to join discord servers and text chat with people to pass the time. I tried to watch some streams on twitch and sometimes could watch on mobile quality, sometimes audio only, sometimes not at all.


Gogo was the only option. Service was poor but I really hate flying and the distraction provided by being able to text chat made it more than worth it.

[cartman]

10-12 years ago I used a first gen Wifi on a Lufthansa flight back to the US. For the time, it worked great. People weren't streaming any and everything yet. I was playing poker on PokerStars and never had any problems with lag or getting dropped.

I've been a quite a few domestic flights lately on United, and the connection has been good to their services (movies and shows on your device, no more screens dropping from the ceiling). Getting to other sites was a bit slow. Plus it only worked over land. On flights to Tampa we lose the connection once we head out over the gulf.