Tag Archives: Speedtest
My first-ever blog post from a plane!
Or maybe not.
There was no way I could pass up the opportunity. Not only am I making this post while in the air over…well, somewhere, (UPDATE: I’m not!) I’m going to use it to tell you a little about how exactly in-flight WiFi works, or doesn’t, what the complexities are, and where it’s expected to go in the future.
The service, or more accurately the idea, is nifty, but there are some major, and I do mean majorly major, caveats. Frankly, and I’ll say this again, it’s so slow I just couldn’t post this from the plane. Failed uploads, 404 errors, and dropped connections, and it didn’t get any better once I arrived at the hotel. Before I get to all of it, here are some screens showing the fun things you can do with in-flight wi-fi, and learn why you should always be careful on public networks.
Look what I got!
I suspect many of you got the same thing. You will find at the end of this post an email from Cox claiming they have just doubled my Internet speeds up to 50 Mbps. I don’t even have to do anything!
That’s very nice of them. However I’d like to make a couple of points about this email; first, I tested my connection on Speedtest (remember that?), and I pulled about 27 up and (amazingly) 16 down with a ping of 36, which is good, not great. My national grade is a B+ and my regional grade A-, however subsequent tests to Mojave were slower while Las Vegas was faster, as expected.
However, the email has some important word choices in it. First, it says “up to” 50Mbps, and the fact is you never get the max speed advertised as that’s only a theoretical based on ideal network conditions which never exist. It also mentions at the bottom of the email you should use what’s known as a DOCSIS (the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) 3.0 compliant modem, and they’re right. If you’ve been using the same modem for more than a year or so, you might want to call up and see if they’ll upgrade you.
