Gogo today announced development of "next generation ground-based technology," but how exactly will it speed up the hideous crawl of in-flight Wi-Fi?
I've been asking the company all day, and its vague answers and long launch schedule feel more like an attempt to stave off criticism of its glacial, ground-based system and slow 2Ku satellite rollout than a serious, near-term deployment of new technology.
Gogo's announcement looks good if you don't want to know anything about how it works. The company promises that by 2018, it'll be able to slap new antennas and modems onto existing planes, which will speed up in-flight connections to 100Mbps per plane. Assuming that there are about 50 people online per plane and maybe 10 people actively downloading things at once, that means we'll be able to see a sensible 2-10Mbps per user. That's a 10x jump from Gogo's ATG-4, which offers 9.8Mbps per plane.
Gogo's ground-based systems also only work in the US. Last year, Gogo demoed 2Ku, a satellite-based system that works globally, but requires expensive new equipment installed on planes, and very slow FAA certification processes to get them installed. On the test flight, I had no problem streaming video, and it works on the ground as well as in the air. Delta has committed to installing 2Ku on 600 aircraft, with the first 35 going into operation by the end of the year.
The ground-based system is designed for "business aircraft, commercial regional jets and select narrow-body aircraft," according to Gogo. To me, that speaks to Gogo's other big North American customer, American Airlines. American just ditched Gogo for its competitor Viasat on 100 new planes, after publicly expressing frustration with ATG-4's lousy speeds.
Gogo's new ground-based system could be installed on American's 628 "American Eagle" regional planes, generally smaller planes flown by a patchwork of small airlines, some of which are wholly owned by American and some of which are independent.
But What Is It?
Gogo wouldn't give us details on how its magical new system works, though, which is frustrating and out of the ordinary for the wireless industry.
Because they operate in crowded airwaves using industry standards, wireless operators—including Gogo up until now, frankly—are generally pretty open about the standards and technologies they use.
The new ground-based system uses LTE over unlicensed spectrum from Gogo's 250 cell sites, with more than 60MHz of bandwidth per plane as opposed to the 3Mhz the company uses for ATG-4, the company told me. But it wouldn't tell me who makes the modems or what spectrum they're using.
It also wouldn't tell me what standard it was using for LTE over unlicensed spectrum, which is a key question. Unlicensed spectrum isn't policed, and so it's full of potential conflicts with other users.
Gogo's plans look to be extremely similar to competitor SmartSky, which is also proposing an air-to-ground LTE network on 60MHz of unlicensed spectrum using about 250 ground-based cell sites. Mary Kirby, one of the nation's top airline bloggers, took a deep look at SmartSky's plans and guesses it may be using 2.4GHz—the same spectrum used by Bluetooth and many Wi-Fi networks.
But if Gogo and SmartSky are operating in the same spectrum—and I'm not saying they are—their systems could potentially interfere with each other, if not coordinated. We don't know, because neither company is giving us enough information to know if their plans will actually work.