Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Companies like Viasat are already offering that. A couple of years ago, they were talking about how they wanted to offer free internet to all passangers (with enough bandwidth that everyone could stream HD movies, thanks to the new satellite they launched in 2017). I'm not sure how the rollout is going, though, or if the airlines want to do this. I guess the airlines can make a fortune overcharging passengers for internet.


I'm a viasat customer. Most days, github.com doesn't exist for me. Anything using SSL is going to fail 30% of the time anyway, and 50%+ of the time after they restrict our bandwidth for the month. Even if they could provide better service, I wouldn't hold my breath in expectation of it.


When I was at Viasat, there was a difference between what was provided to consumers (Exede) and what they were providing to airlines with their new satellite. The new one has much higher bandwidth than their older one. I’m not sure if the new satellites will service consumer internet too as I left the company before Viasat-2 became fully operational.


if there's an option for turning off caching, or "network speed up" in your modem, turning it off helped for me when I was trapped with hughesnet for a while. moved me up to about 75% of GitHub.com requests working.

essentially, their caching mechanism was broken for a ton of the sites I went to visit.


> A couple of years ago, they were talking about how they wanted to offer free internet to all passangers (with enough bandwidth that everyone could stream HD movies, thanks to the new satellite they launched in 2017). I'm not sure how the rollout is going, though, or if the airlines want to do this. I guess the airlines can make a fortune overcharging passengers for internet.

The only thing that makes sense to me right now is what airlines are already doing: serving cached video from a server on the airplane.


Yes, that’s actually what I worked on when I worked for them a few years back (specifically I worked on using satellite internet to update the onboard media libraries), but on launch of their new satellite they were pushing for simply allowing streaming.


JetBlue has had ViaSat for free since 2013.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: