How Does “Wi-Fi” Connect to the Internet in the Air?

Wi-Fi Isn’t Necessarily Wi-Fi

When you get on that business jet or airliners and tap into the “Wi-Fi” so you can keep working or watch Netflix, what you’re really doing is connecting to the internet via some kind of satellite or air-to-ground network. Wi-Fi is just a local network on the airplane that connects your device to the airplane’s router, just like in your home. 

Wi-Fi stands for wireless fidelity, and all it really means is that your home or aircraft has a local network (ie, not necessarily connected to the internet) and that you can connect your phone or laptop or tablet or TV to that network. However, you can’t get any content from that connection unless your router, which hosts the Wi-Fi network, is connected to the outside world, the internet.

At home, this may be a fiber-optic or other type of high-speed wired connection, unless you’re a T-Mobile wireless customer like my daughter, who pays only $35 per month for internet service (win!). 

All this is just to point out that when we say “The Wi-Fi isn’t working,” a network engineer will ask, “Well, do you mean the Wi-Fi network or do you mean the connection to the internet?” These are two different things.

HOW DO PLANES GET INTERNET WITHOUT WIRES?

There are two primary methods: air-to-ground (ATG) or satellite communications (satcom). In writing about these, we lump them as generic “airborne connectivity” or “in-flight connectivity.” No matter what, your Wi-Fi connection in the air isn’t going to do you any good if there is no ATG or satcom available.

Earlier products in this arena were limited in bandwidth. You’ll hear all sorts of marketing spiel about system speeds, but what really matters is how many users the ATG or satcom system can handle. Each device uses roughly 1 megabit per second (mbps) of the available bandwidth, so if you have a system like Gogo’s Avance L3 ATG, which is capable of 3-4 mpbs, once you have more than one person with a few devices trying to log on, it’s going to choke. Avance L5 ATG is faster, but can handle only up to about 10 devices at a time. Gogo is about to switch on its “5G” ATG (not to be confused with 5G cellular, I know it’s confusing), and that will be much more capable than L3 or L5. 

The ATG landscape is about to change, however. Mark Casey, CEO of Apcela, has resurrected the former SmartSky ATG network that was built to compete with Gogo ATG. SmartSky was installed in fewer than 20 aircraft and never reached liftoff before it went belly up. But Casey believes there is a market for an ATG competitor, and the new Apcela ATG offers speeds much higher than Gogo L3 and L5 and can thus handle multiple simultaneous users, as will Gogo 5G.

Now, here’s the rub with ATG: it’s only available in the continental U.S. and it does reach over some borders a little bit. If you want to go outside the U.S. the only choice is, you guessed it, satcom, which we’ll discuss in part 2.