Virgin America In-flight Wi-Fi (Gogo) Experience

by Big A on Jun.04, 2009, under Airlines

Seeing the promotions about Virgin America (VX) Wi-Fi aka: Gogo, I had to test it out its on-board Internet service. The first thing was to book a Wi-Fi enabled flight. Fortunately, the majority of Virgin America’s flights are Gogo-enabled, and Virgin America’s aim is to enable all their planes by the end of summer 2009.

The cost plan for Virgin America Wifi (Gogo) is as follows:

$12.95 for flights of 3 hours or more
$9.95 for flights less than 3 hours

Now for actual speeds, I ran a couple tests from different sites:

Realistically, I browsed a few sites for my own testing purposes. Virgin’s WiFi download speeds are great. ESPN and CNN loaded within a few seconds. Hulu and Youtube could stream video without any interruption. Upload speeds on the other hand were slow, I tried to upload a 2MB file, and I had to stop it because it took long.

Overall, the Gogo connection is good. I would pay for Virgin’s Gogo on-board Internet service for a longer flight. My flight was only an hour and only about 30 minutes of actual use, but anything longer than 1 hour of actual use, I would consider to pre-occupying myself on a Virgin plane.