They also encourage you to provide info on yourself (create an account, provide birthday) to even use the screen on the seat back…
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.
For real. I’d rather watch an ad than have to pay $10+ for a couple hours of wifi.
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.
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.
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
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.
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…
Maybe it got you thirty cents off the ticket 😉
Better PR if they have a button underneath that says “skip ad ($20)”?
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 radarr 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.
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
I once had a flight in two legs where the first leg was operated by a well known established airline for an okay ish price and the second leg was operated by a “sister” airline that did shorter ultra low cost flights. The first flight had infotainment screens and a few other minor comforts that are standard for economy flights these days and make it just slightly more bearable, whereas the 2nd flight had no screens, no food without paying separately and just made as uncomfortable as possible on purpose.
During the first flight, you could use their crappy as screens on the back of the chair in front or connect to their local network with your own device, which was free and didn’t involve any shenanigans like ads or accounts. I made use of the service which worked by entering a URL printed on the back of the chair in front. On the second leg, there was no screens and no apparent mention of an onboard entertainment offering through your own devices but there was some sort of QR code which I assume was supposed to take you to a payment portal or something but which didn’t even work. It was a different URL to the first flight.
I still had my tab open from the first flight though, and when I accidentally opened that tab on the second flight, I got access to the seemingly hidden entertainment service with no payment or logins or anything. Seems that sometimes it’s just a question of knowing the magic URL.
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.
is it free? I mean you either pay with money, time and/or data.
If the ad is short and subsidizes free wifi, I ain’t mad. But if the ad is unreasonably long, or if I have to keep watching ads every x minutes to use WiFi, it becomes a problem. Not sure what the case is here, but it should be spelled out on the screen so we know what we’re getting ourselves into.
It’s a single short ad and works better than any plane Wi-Fi I’ve ever used. OP has one of the most entitled takes I’ve ever seen.
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
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.
Ntp is the time protocol, right?
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.
I have no idea how to do that on tailscale as I use pivpn on a vps. It works on Norwegian airlines and SAS, but I assume other systems might block traffic differently.
Definitely worth a bit of research to see if it’s feasible (or potentially just set up wireguard for those cases). Thanks!
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.
I have all this, except the NTP port… Any advice on how to set this part up?
I just set up the server to listen on port 123/udp(ntp). You can also try port 53 although that isn’t always reliable.
Thanks, I saw you mention SAS. I fly with them often, I might try this out. (Usually log in and then flip on the VPN)
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.
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.
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 :)
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)
I am talking about the cdwifi.cz captive portal with its 30-second video ad. I cannot just disable large media because then the “Continue” button never gets enabled.
So does Delta/T-Mobile
You might be able to bypass it with Orbot and a snowflake. Alternatively don’t use it.
Maybe they should make it so you can choose whether you want to watch an ad or pay. A lot of people will still choose to watch the ad.
Their schtick is free Wi-Fi, so it would kinda take away from their model.
