Norwegian (The low cost airline “Norwegian Air Shuttle”) has had free WiFi since 2012. It was the first company to offer WiFI on European flight. They use some company called Row 44 for their Wifi installations.
I would expect there to be multiple client equipment manufacturers, but what about the satellite network? Which one?
I read recently that most of the airlines use ground based transmitters for inflight wifi which would explain the speed & cost issues.
But that of course doesn’t explain lenthamen’s transatlantic flight.
These guys seem to be the big players, from what I can see.
Link
Gogo is an all American service, not a big player worldwide.
I have never seen any antennae pointing upwards, on the GSM towers in Europe.
I think they must be using satellites here.
You can get better than expected performance if you force everybody to go via a web proxy which does image compression. It trashes the quality of pictures but most people (using phones etc) won’t notice. Various terrestrial networks have played with this and I have some ancient notes here. Interestingly, lenthamen’s post shows T-Mobile and they are precisely the one network I know about which by default uses data compression today. In the terrestrial mobile data scenario you can turn this off but you must be connected via a T-M IP (see the end of that writeup). You could probably easily serve 200 passengers from a 1mbit/sec connection. Most won’t be using it, and you can bandwidth limit it so that anybody downloading videos gets a uselessly slow connection. You absolutely have to do something like that because you cannot provide 200 passengers with a 1080P HD download capability 
Hi guys,
Does anyone have PIREPs on the max altitude LTE has proven to work in a reasonable capacity? I’ve noted some email availability (EDGE or similar) at FL60 over metropolitan areas but is insufficient to gather weather radar data. Today, I did a test to measure the required mobile data download on Garmin Pilot of radar and cloud overlays, it came in at 1.7mb. 3G reception would be required for this but it doesn’t get the required SNR for it. I don’t have an LTE subscription (never mind LTE roaming) on my iPAD but I do wonder if the multi cell connectivity might improve this?
p.s. Garmin Pilot weather overlays are NICE albeit the app missing Class A airspace…
DMEarc
If you have any mobile phone data connection the way to go is data reduction. This will have much better results than trying to improve available bandwidth. You can try my free ADLConnect iPad or iPhone app. To get all the features you will need an account from German weather service but it is able to do weather downloads using only a few kilobytes.
By LTE do you mean GPRS/3G?
I tend to find ~1000ft is the highest at which you get anything useful i.e. long enough to collect a few text-only emails. IOW, useless when flying.
There are exceptions in mountainous areas in France and Spain. I almost posted something, as a joke, on EuroGA, from FL100 over Spain, last weekend, but lost it.
Text messages (GSM) work OK usually below 2000ft, with rare exceptions at all other altitudes right up to FL200 (IME). But you need a hacked phone to pick up the very brief moments of GSM connectivity and send the message out. Old phones (e.g. Nokia 6310i) could be set up to retry every say 10 seconds but modern ones give up after a few tries. My Nokia 808 is hacked to retry for ever, every 3 mins. I would like it to retry much more often but the guy who did the hack won’t play ball
If you could send data over SMS and have a very aggressive GSM device which grabs every opportunity, then you can have a good practical solution. I suggested means of encoding e.g. radar data to Avbrief, years ago, but there was no interest.
While I don’t know exactly which system AT&T use in the US, I’ve had continuous coverage on a flight at FL100 last year. As a backup to my iPad I run ForeFlight on my iPhone, which lives in a suction holder on the flat part of the Cessna wind shield, just where it meets the top of the instrument panel. For fun, as I wanted to test it, I kept the wx overlay active during the flight. Lo and behold – I had inflight wx! Who’d have thunk it…… mind you, the exercise did drain the battery in about 90 minutes! But it worked.
In Spain I have regularly seen reception in the FL 85 region.
Does anyone have PIREPs on the max altitude LTE has proven to work in a reasonable capacity?
I think that the answer will vary hugely from location to location. If there are mountains around, you’re likely to get a connection at a higher altitude than if the surrounding terrain is all flat.
