Those of you who had to deal with in-flight Wi-Fi at any point during your travels know how much of a headache it is: it loads and it doesn’t, you get text but forget about photos and say goodbye completely to any videos you planned on watching while floating above the clouds.
This particular type of tech suffering might soon come to an end though: in-flight Wi-Fi provider Gogo is now planning to launch a 5G network specifically designed for business and commercial aircraft, as early as 2021.
With 5G capable of boosting not only the speed of wireless networks but also coverage and responsiveness, capable of working between 10 and 100 times faster than your regular connection today, 5G it would change the face of in-flight Wi-Fi coverage completely.
Making it happen sounds less complicated than you’d expect it to: the company wants to build a new air-to-ground network on the top of the 250 towers it already has and use an unlicensed spectrum in the 2.5GHz range – that’s a wavelength that combines -quite solidly- speed and distance characteristics.
This new network will be capable of supporting other spectrum types and bands in the future but will be capable of falling back to 3G and 4G services, as needed.
“We expect to launch Gogo 5G at the same time as the terrestrial telecommunications companies are deploying the same generation of technology on the ground — a first in the inflight connectivity industry,” Gogo CEO Oakleigh Thorne said in a statement “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.”
The aircraft will send and receive cellular signals and the passengers will have to log into the Gogo service to use Wi-Fi, as always. The only difference will be in the fact that the new service will cost less to operate and have lower latency when compared to satellite technologies.
According to Gogo, the 5G program will be offered as an easy upgrade to the existing airline customers so you’ll probably see it make an appearance on American Delta and United flights quite soon after its implementation.
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