A few days ago I had an opportunity to try wireless while I was traveling to LA for IETF 77. I haven’t flown Virgin America in a while although I heard about the wireless offered during flight. Here are some interesting things I noted while on transit.

1) You must be above 30,000 feet before the service is turned on.

2) If you are flying international and coming into the country the wireless service is turned off when you are at a certain distance (can’t recall the exact number).

3) It costs $9.95 for the flight. A great deal if you are flying across country for 5 hours, I will be doing that end of this month so looking forward to getting some work done during the flight.

4) Network latency is not too bad. I was above Santa Barbara and my ping time to a server at my data center was 135ms. My upload speed was 1.1Mbps and download speed was 0.3Mbps.

5) No IPv6 support. I was sad but not surprised.

One of the great advantages of using a wireless service (aside from working or passing time) is that you can contact someone to pick you up within 15 mins of when you land. As you descend you know you are close,  so a perfect opportunity to send a note to your designated chauffeur. I had a rather unfortunate incident at LAX where I dropped my iPhone into a sink with running water, I saw the screen flicker and it went dark. I missed an important call to a colleague which was frustrating but I also had not contacted my colleague at work to pick me up from the airport. Having wireless in the airplane enabled me to contact my colleague at work to pick me up when I landed, if I did not have wireless on the airplane it would have been difficult to contact  him when I landed since my phone was absolutely dead with no access to my contacts. It wouldn’t be impossible for me to get back to work because I can always resort to what one did in the old days e.g. use a pay phone, call the office receptionist etc but who want to live in the stone age?