Hey y'all, it's Austin. Gogo Inc., the in-flight Wi-Fi company customers love to hate, says it's finally bringing its airborne network into the modern age. The Chicago-based internet provider plans to offer 5G service starting in 2021 aboard certain airlines in North America and Canada.
For passengers who have long paid exorbitant prices for what can feel like BlackBerry-era service quality, you might ask why Gogo doesn't fix its current networks before leaping ahead to the next big thing. But Gogo is just another wireless company in the long line of tech giants glomming onto the sky-high promises of fifth-generation connectivity. Motorola and Samsung Electronics Co. see their 5G handsets as a big competitive edge. The largest American telecoms are already marketing versions of 5G to subscribers, even though the services don't meet 5G standards. Neville Ray, T-Mobile US Inc.'s chief technology officer, said recently that the "5G hype machine is already in overdrive."
Equipment makers like Huawei Technologies Co. are duking it out with rivals and regulators to win the 5G infrastructure battle. For Huawei, it's not going well in the U.S. The White House's denunciation of Huawei has caused a scramble in Silicon Valley, which is realizing that, without the Chinese company, the industry may not be able to deliver on its 5G promises.
U.S.-China tensions also contributed to Gogo's current service predicament. Dave Mellin, a spokesman for Gogo, says the company had planned to transition to a faster 4G LTE network last year but suspended the effort due to the Trump administration's concerns about ZTE, a Chinese company that would have supplied the technology.
Gogo's 5G commitment is particularly perilous. A Gogo representative told technology website the Verge that the company will first deploy 5G capacity on "a few towers," though the representative could not specify when those tests would begin. Gogo's network is still mostly reliant on earthbound infrastructure 30,000 feet below airplanes.
The system of land-based towers essentially shoots internet signals to compatible Delta and United flights passing overhead. Data speeds are unreliable, if not outright painful for frequent fliers. Gogo acknowledges that, even in the wonderful new era of 5G, customers will likely bounce back and forth between 3G and 4G (or No G?) over the course of a flight.
This reality is a far cry from the way Oakleigh Thorne, Gogo's chief executive officer, described the network's potential: "Gogo 5G is the next step in our technology evolution and is expected to deliver an unparalleled user experience, pairing high performance with low latency and network-wide redundancy."
It's hard to imagine airplane Wi-Fi ever providing an "unparalleled user experience." And it's not the first time we've heard these promises. Here's former Gogo CEO Michael Small in 2015: "We've gotten our reliability to very high levels now. We think we have one of the world's most reliable, if not the most reliable, system." Uh.
The real question for Gogo and its ilk is why they would promote something they won't likely be able to deliver for years. Mellin, the Gogo spokesman, says the company needed to inform clients of development plans with 4G upgrades on hold. "Our business aviation and regional jet customers were anxious to know what we were planning to do instead, and we felt it was important to let them know about our decision to pursue a 5G network as far in advance as we could," Mellin wrote in an email.
But it may have set expectations too high. After reading Gogo marketing materials, you might envision yourself aboard a plane, with Netflix streaming on your laptop while shooting down friends in Fortnite. Don't count on it.
We've come to expect the air travel experience to be filled with disappointments. The more concerning thing is when the technology industry starts acting like those in the business of flying. —Austin Carr
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