Internet at 30,000 ft == ASS

[laggedreaction]

Anyway, I'm on a JAL flight from Tokyo Narita to Chicago O'Hare right now and I decided to try the inflight internet service. They advertise it has 'high-speed broadband', yet it feels slower than dial up. I'll admit, I didn't expect much, but it's interesting to see the results and kill time on a 10h50min flight.

Here's one speed test I did:
http://majesticpunk.com/images/connexionbb.jpg

[Druid]

Quite a attention grabbing title there....

[SDSUMarcus01]

I want to see ping times. LOL.

[laggedreaction]

I want to see ping times. LOL.

Gimme an IP to ping.

[SDSUMarcus01]

Gimme an IP to ping.

www.yahoo.com?

[haterllnation]

Yahoo.com and Microsoft.com are the top places to ping when told to ping. I know different regions have different ideas of what "high speed" really is. I don't know how that goes to airspace. :(

[laggedreaction]

http://majesticpunk.com/images/pingbb.gif

[SDSUMarcus01]

OUCH... that sucks. My time is 96 ms.

[haterllnation]

my max is 52 haha. 96 is ouch to me.

[SDSUMarcus01]

my max is 52 haha. 96 is ouch to me.

You sure you're reading the ms and not the TTL?

[haterllnation]

Ha dude I know what to look for :) Well, I would hope or I am in the wrong major. :X Actually, I did it again and now I'm at 48.

[SDSUMarcus01]

N/m... I just did it again and got an average of 18ms.

Last time I just typed yahoo.com, this time I typed www.yahoo.com... it pings different servers (I just checked). Yay for DNS...

[haterllnation]

Wow. That is a huge drop. On the yahoo.com mine only went 20 higher, but 48 isn't impressive as 18. Yay Midwest :(

[SDSUMarcus01]

Wow. That is a huge drop. On the yahoo.com mine only went 20 higher, but 48 isn't impressive as 18. Yay Midwest :(

Cox cable is crazy out here... I can upload at like 130+ kb/s and download at who knows what (never found a place to max it out, utorrent won't let me go higher than 600 something but I've gotten faster from microsoft update).

I remember when we first got cable maxing out at like 300 down and 20 up.

[haterllnation]

I can get some impressive U/D speeds but I guess since I am here sharing with everyone it's rare. By the time I can make a giddy, school girl giggle, it goes away. Oh well.

[SDSUMarcus01]

I share with my family too... my little brother is just as much as a bandwidth whore.

I wonder what I'd get if I just hooked the cable modem directly to my computer... I DO have a gigabit lan card... but we know it won't go THAT fast.

[mikem]

I'd take those speed and latency any day ... compared with what we've had for the last 40 years in planes ...

[羽之助]

I remember when my grandfather would try and use shortwave radio to connect his OMNIVAC computer to land-based systems. He complained that the plane could only go so far before the power cord ran out.

[laggedreaction]

I just tried Skype and it worked fine. That's a hell of a deal considering the normal phones on the plane are like $10 a min. Guess bandwidth isn't that bad.

Well, gotta go. We're almost over Dubuque right now and landing in 25 min.

[MeneerDijk]

Those ping times are quite normal for a sattelite connection, the signal has to go a long way up to space, and then a long way down to earth again, through a number of hubs, and when it reaches the destination it has to go all the way back again to the airplane. I figure the bandwith is ok once the download is running, but when you are just surfing a page will load very slow.

[Scott]

You can have high-speed broadband that's slow. For example, it'll take you a while to actually start downloading something (music, website, etc.), but when you start, it should fly by. Satellite connections especially are high-speed, high-latency connections.