I recently flew to Iceland with Iceland air, and as it was a 3 hour flight from Frankfurt, I was happy to try the on-board Internet to stay connected. For 12 euros a flight, it was perhaps not cheap, but compared to the price of the ticket, it’s almost negligible. As large parts of the trip are over water, satellite connectivity was used. Like the on-board Internet I reviewed last year on Delta when flying to the US, connectivity was provided by Viasat.
And like back then, downlink data rates were in the range of 30 to 40 Mbps. Round trip times were around 680 ms, so not stellar, and uplink data rates peaked at around half a megabit per second. In other words, all pretty much the same as on the Delta flight to the US last year and quite usable.
I’m not sure why but Youtube did not run smoothly, while other video services did. Also, Voice over Wi-Fi and my private voice service worked nicely over the link, but interactivity with a round trip delay of 680 ms is not much fun. But then, you are over the Atlantic, hundreds of miles away from land.
On a side note: Starlink is also pushing to become an Internet provider for airlines. Once they go online, I expect to see significantly higher uplink data rates and of course very low round trip times due to the low earth orbit satellites used by that system. Definitely a game changer!
