A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions

> The only downside was that although we broke through the network restrictions and could access any website, the plane’s bandwidth was extremely limited, making web browsing quite painful.

Unfortunately this is also the downside of paying. Many times I have paid for internet, only to find it unusably bad. To be fair, I just flew a transcontinental flight on Air Canada the other day and the wifi was fine.

This is likely another layer of security that they didn't break through:

To prevent chat apps from consuming lots of bandwidth typically your connection is severely bandwidth restricted until you pay. If they didn't then someone could simply stream movies from their chat apps.

I’ve been the unfortunate one who paid and endured the slow-barely-usable/mostly unusable speeds. However, that was before the Starlink era. So if you’re gonna pay for WiFi, it’s worth checking if the flight is equipped with Starlink.

I don't think so, compared to transcontinental, which lately (before Starlink) has been using the cell towers on the ground + satellite backhaul -- even paying would probably still result in a garbage experience.

The point is that if the connection does have more bandwidth available they wouldn't get that extra bandwidth without paying.

Do consumer rights exist in the skies? Genuine question!

Yeah, I just flew WestJet from Canada to Honolulu and was amazed; full 1080p YouTube with no hiccups and I was able to play some (non-latency sensitive) online games, all over the Pacific. This was fully intentional; there wasn't any back-of-the-seat iPad for watching movies or anything, they straight up tell you to use your own device and watch Netflix. I did some research after and found a lot of airlines in NA are going to be rolling out satellite internet in the next year or two.

For some reason, being fully connected at 50mbps+ on a plane seems more futuristic sci-fi to me than everything AI.

> This was fully intentional; there wasn't any back-of-the-seat iPad for watching movies or anything, they straight up tell you to use your own device and watch Netflix.

Westjet has required you to use your own device for a long time now (10 years?), but they offer an app/website and streaming library that works for anyone who connects to the in-plane wifi, unrelated to actual access to the internet.

Interesting that they're telling you to use your own streaming app/account now. Did you still have to pay extra for internet access? Was the Westjet streaming app still available?

Nope, wifi was free. Well, have to sign up for WestJet rewards, so the price is your personal data and such. No WestJet streaming option, the information card in the backseat tells you to use your own Netflix account; yes, literally mentioning Netflix by name.