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The future is here! Now you can literally stay connected to anything on the Internet wherever you are.
As technology development never stops, now we can also relish in flying with faster Wi-Fi connections. Gogo, the company providing Wi-Fi connections to almost 75% of North American planes, has made a long awaited announcement: they are launching a new technology that will drastically speed up current Wi-Fi connections on planes.
The new piece of technology created by Gogo is named 2Ku satellite internet and is considered the next generation in matters of connectivity above the clouds. So, what is so great about the 2Ku satellite? Up until now, in-flight Wi-Fi could be used for messaging and Internet browsing, but that was pretty much it. From this moment onwards, we will be able to fill the long hours of flights and forget about boredom by accessing services like HBO, Netflix or YouTube. The best part is that we will be able to open more than one of these services at the same time.
To be more specific, airplanes will receive from Gogo a connection of 70 megabit-per-second. As a comparison, the average home connections are four times slower. Apparently when 40 devices are connected to one such device, the speed reaches around 12 Mbps, almost the same we get from a 4G connection. This was tested on a Boeing 737 plane. The system also uses one antenna for download and one for upload.
Michael Small, Gogo CEO, is positive that every passenger on a plane will be able to browse and stream. He added that despite the fact that changing things in aviation can prove difficult, he is sure that most companies will do anything to get the 2Ku on board of their planes. Travelers will keep themselves entertained by playing games and watching movies or TV series, but also live television.
So when will we be able to test this new feature? Gogo has plans to install the 2Ku satellite internet on about 550 planes, all of which are in eight states in America. Some airplanes will already fly by the end of 2015, with a couple more in 2017, and sources report that the company most likely to be the first is Delta. However, the mass deployment of the technology will happen in 2017 -2018. Even though we might have to wait a bit, surely flying with faster Wi-Fi connections is one’s dream come true, especially in our times.
Image Source: www.pixabay.com
