They also encourage you to provide info on yourself (create an account, provide birthday) to even use the screen on the seat back…
It’s a free wifi service provided by the airline while on the flight. One ad, when most other places are charging $10-20 per flight? I’ll watch the single ad. I’d rather that then someone, say, injecting adverts into sites and services. which is very possible.
Agree, which is why this is mildly infuriating and not worse. Of course there were about 10 minutes of unskippable ads on their media screens before take-off which was a pleasure to be subjected to. That should get everyone free WiFi without needing an additional ad…
on the bright side they could make you watch an ad to check your bags, check in, and find your seat the way things are going
Execs are furiously taking notes right now
Shhhhhhhh
Isn’t the WiFi free? It’s free for a reason. You aren’t forced to use it.
I understood the mildly infuriating aspect to be how airlines find a way to extract value from you at every step of your trip.
I still open Plex and sync a bunch of shit to my phone or tablet before I take any flights. Old-school is still the way.
For real. I’d rather watch an ad than have to pay $10+ for a couple hours of wifi.
And they all interrupt the “in flight entertainment” to read a VERY long and slowly delivered advertisement for their proprietary credit card (and in flight entertainment that you have to supply device for, so you end up with smaller screen, unstable connection, battery drain and watched at a painful viewing angle typically)
As opposed to an open source credit card?
Proprietary, as in, branded specifically to the airline itself. Like a Allegiant credit card, for example.
I know
Oh cool, so just a pain in the ass then.
I was making a joke :)
Plane WiFi is a modern technological marvel and you’re lucky to be able to have it at all.
Not so long ago sat phones were the domain of the super rich, because they were paying several dollars per minute. Then it was down to 10 dollars for two hours of multiplexed satellite access. And now apparently it’s down to where advertising will work. That’s amazing.
Any plane internet I’ve used has been spotty and terribly slow, but then again, I haven’t bought it in years because of previous experiences. I can stand to be without it for 2.5 hours.
The speed is probably because you have to share 2mbps of bandwidth with 100+ people
I’ve been on some United flights that let you stream 4k video with no issue. It’s pretty uncommon, but it’s amazing when it’s there.
Was this 4k video from an arbitrary source, like a random YouTube video? Or from United’s website?
I haven’t flown outside is Southwest in a while, but they have a bunch of licensed video content that is hosted locally on the plane. And therefore cheap.
It’s content from places like Netflix or Hulu, or anywhere else on the general internet.
Plane wifi, in the Continental US, is typically done via cell networks. The plane just has stronger receivers and transmitters than your cellphone.
No, it’s mostly ViaSat (like in OP’s picture) now. Gogo never upgraded their infra to handle more traffic and kinda fell out of relevance. Planes with ViaSat will have large oval satellite domes on top that talk up to space.
It’s illegal to use your cell phone’s cell modem on a plane, because of an FCC rule, not an FAA rule. The cells in the cell network are designed for traffic on the ground. At cruising altitude, your modem can see way too many cells at once.
I doubt the ads are streamed over the internet, this could easily be done with local storage.
With a possible quick database update over the internet to log views
I flew on Porter and their “ad” was just a 30 second thing about how they’re a cool airline. That’s fine, although the real cost is that they make you have a rewards account
You don’t have to have an account. The alternative is an ad every 30 minutes though and a kind of annoying disconnect (maybe?) depending on your device.
I went with making an account but the person flying with me just watched the same ad every 30 min.
It sucks but I like this over what target and walmart do. If you wanna use their wifi now you MUST create an account on their website and use that to login to their wifi.
At least they don’t charge like $10 per hour to go at 64 kbits
More infuriating is the forced login on the infotainment screen. That’s extremely infuriating
Wireguard vpn+pihole and you won’t need to watch those ads. Set it up to use an ntp port, and you won’t have to sign in to use the wifi.
The airplane captive portals generally don’t work if you use a different DNS.
I’ve always had to defer to “automatic” DNS and let DHCP give me the DNS address in order to access the wifi
It is possible to use VPN over DNS. Some mad lads back in the '90s made a DNS server that would forward TCP packets over name service text records. The captive portals usually still let DNS pass. But it’s not like you’re going to be able to use any high bandwidth applications that way.
Hold up, using the ntp port to skip WiFi sign in is a game changer. Any way to do that with Tailscale on iOS?
Nice one.
But now that you outed the secret, we just need to QoS the NTP port.
Is using ntp port for WireGuard safe?
If you call security trough obscurity a security measure, then it’s really safe. Bots scanning for wireguard servers won’t find yours because they’ll be looking for the default port. In general wireguard will only respond to wireguard traffic, so a bot trying to exploit an ntp server will see silence as wireguard will not respond to actual ntp traffic.
I flew business class international on united and there were ads before every movie. Their business class product used to be great, and now it’s a joke.
They can’t be making much off this surely, how long would the ad have to be for it to even be worthwhile showing?
This comment reminds me that one time I came across an hour and a half long ad on YouTube that turned out to be a full episode of some show and something else. It was crazy to see one that long after skipping a couple ads
For a time, the Lego movie was an add on YouTube. The full thing. You could skip it after 5 seconds, but you had the option of watch the full movie.
The more infuriating thing will be realizing that the inflight wifi is basically only good for texting and email.
I flew Delta last year and got their free WiFi when I signed up for an account with them. Think it was for a loyalty program for every flight I flew with them and one of the perks was free WiFi.
I used it for streaming from my Plex server at home and watched 1984 and some other movies on my phone on the flight and don’t remember encountering any buffering or other issues the whole time. Was pleasantly surprised and grateful for that so I didn’t have to use their movie selection.
Though I do have to say they had a pretty good free selection to choose from. I remember even TV shows which I thought was weird like The Sopranos was on there. I just preferred choosing from my own library and continuing where I left off on my server.
I download from my Plex server to my local device (phone) for offline viewing
I like scrolling through the offerings because it clues me in to foreign language films I had no idea existed, then I add them to my sonarr library.
Jetblue’s wifi is pretty decent. Not sure what technology they’re using but it’s quite a bit faster than some of the other airlines that make you pay for it.
So does Delta/T-Mobile
Is there a way to capture these pages and report them to uBlock filter authors once online? I’d like to add a filter (or better, userscript that just enables and “clicks” the “continue” button) for my country’s rail company’s Wi-Fi captive portal but the JavaScript is obfuscated or compiled from another language so I have no idea what anything does, and of course the element classes are all randomized.
Can confirm that on Android with Firefox mobile + ublock origin the ads wouldn’t load and you were able to skip quite fast. (Not agreeing with the ads being displayed at all, that’s just a greedy move)
Better than Delta. “We have made it our mission to put accessible wifi on every flight. Unfortunately, this plane is not yet equipped… So pay us money to connect to our other wifi instead.”
