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I’m writing this post from an airplane.

I’ve taken advantage the opportunity to test the Delta In-Flight WiFi.  32,000 feet above the ground, my signal is carried by AirCell LLC from the plane all the way down to Earth.  AirCell’s website explains that the connection is uses a special form of 3G to span the few miles from Earh to the plane on exclusive frequencies purchased at auction from the FCC in 2006. The ‘last mile’ so to speak is of course covered by an in-plane access point. There appear to be two such access points in the plane, as well as 13 other APs that, I can only guess, are used by the plane itself for something. Aircell seems to be using an AT&T line to the Internet on it’s side.

Prices for the service are, as you would expect, somewhat exorbitant; I paid $10 for the privilege of being online during my 3 hour flight (though, to be fair, the price would have covered a longer trip as well, from what I can tell; it may be a 24 hour pass.

I’m happy to announce that the service is acceptably good. The standard internet speed test at speedtest.net provided a ping latency of about 200ms, download speeds of 500 to 1000 Kbps, and uploads of about 330 Kbps, with otherwise small deviations between a few test sites.

Furthermore, AirCell has been very kind about port access. I’m happy to report that the connection does not firewall outgoing ports; SSH, FTP, HTTP[S], DNS, IMAP[S] and even the default SMTP port, 25, have been left open. There doesn’t appear to be any sort of firewall in place whatsoever; my SSH and VPN connections are functioning normally and I’ve been able to successfully use a mail client. All systems are go!

Once very nice feature of the AirCell system is real time flight tracking. Simply enter the airline identifier and flight number and you can track your plane’s progress accross the country on a Google map. This feature is intriguing, no doubt, to anyone who, like me, is constantly looking down through holes in the clouds and wondering what part of the country he’s seeing. Trip details like scheduled and estimated arrival time, and airplane positional data including distance to and from the destination and origin respectively, is also available. The google map is a bit small, and appears to be implemented with the older version of their API (remember Hybrid view?), but is a very nice feature. Although it’s difficult to pinpoint specific landmarks like lakes and roads, the map does an excellent job of giving passengers a general idea of where their plane is and what larger metropolitan and geographic landmarks might be seen from the window.

All in all, I’d say that, for those who cannot afford or stand to be disconnected for the duration of their flight, the in flight wifi is a reasonable proposition. The price is high, but, given that the service does seem to be exclusive to AirCell, could be higher. $10 for a new technology – or at least a new service – such as this does not seem unreasonable. The connection speeds aren’t great, but they aren’t intolerable either. I haven’t had any connection problems yet. Good job, AirCell!