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Some airlines now offer in-flight WiFi to their passengers. Not knowing exactly how these things work, I'm imagining there could potentially be a lot of buffering involved that makes streaming video services like Netflix fairly useless. Will in-flight WiFi from a service like Gogo Air be suitable for heavy internet use such as streaming video? What kind of download speeds can be expected?

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    Do you really need to be the "awesome guy" who clogs up the channel for the entire plane?
    – dnbrv
    Mar 15, 2012 at 2:12
  • If I were running the gogo air service I would blacklist all streaming media sites to prevent this very situation.
    – RobotHumans
    Mar 15, 2012 at 7:08

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I was able to find this pertinent bit specifically for Gogo Air:

...Gogo may prioritize, restrict, or set limits (such as bandwidth allocations, or limits on types of content accessed or transferred) on your use of the Service for certain applications. In times of heavy network usage, this may impact the functioning of high bandwidth applications. As with any mobile broadband network, speed may vary due to your device, atmospheric conditions, terrain, network capacity, and aircraft location. Content, file sharing or multiplayer gaming requiring high bandwidth, such as VoIP, streaming audio and video, and file sharing, are given a lower priority and at times may be blocked or not work consistently...

So it seems like streaming video would likely be a poor experience for both the user and for other passengers in the case of Gogo Air. I don't know about other services.

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