iConverged

On my flight back home  from CTIA Wireless 2009, I was on a southwest flight (one of only 4 in southwest) that offered free Wifi over satellite as a test. Here is a quick test of how it performed

So I powered on my laptop, and sure enough a full signal.

Connected in 2 seconds flat. Nice!

I am asked to sign into their internet (free for now. They may charge $4.99 in future, based on survey questions they asked me. Heck I’d pay.)

After signing in, I get placed into a Yahoo Powered Southwest portal. Southwest folks  requested that I fill in their survey (optional) if I use their internet. Sure. Always ready to give feedback to good people. 6-8 pages of a survey (yawn) but a promise is a promise. Done, so now I completely ignore this informational portal (hate them) and get back to the bland Google page

How about a Speed test?

Not too bad, huh ? The ISP is familiar to me as well.

 But whoops, 1 hour into work, everything slows to a crawl and finally I get errors everywhere. Hmm, satellite drop somewhere ? Pretty bumpy ride this.

After gradual slowdown, in 10 mins I lost complete connection. But it seems I got kicked off as well, so I re-sign in

 And lo and behold – back to a level of respectability.

Let’s test streaming (did not test HD, though)

Buffer bar a little later:

Buffer bar a little later:

Not bad. Reasonable read ahead buffer maintained that got larger over time. Read speed better than display buffer needed. Nice.

What did I do ?

• IM (Pidgin)
• Facebook
• Read news
• Sync and replicate my Lotus Notes
• Checked my favorite blogs
• Saw some videos, just for test.