The recovery of passenger traffic in the domestic US market continues to show strength. As travelers return, however, they will notice many changes to the in-flight experience. Among those changes, a shift in the way some inflight connectivity subscriptions operate.
Specifically, passengers who use their T-Mobile account to access a free hour of Gogo connectivity may now encounter an additional prompt. Rather than simply allowing anyone with the correct phone number to connect the system will now send a one-time PIN via text message to the account phone number.
For travelers who used to borrow a friend’s phone number to connect this means no more free wifi on board.
Reducing friction, increasing profits
The move makes sense for both Gogo/Intelsat and for T-Mobile.The former hopes for higher revenue from real subscriptions rather than the discounted session fees it sells in bulk. The latter can expect reduced costs as freeloaders are eliminated from the system.
But this also highlights one of the challenges facing inflight connectivity providers and efforts to reduce friction in the connection process. Whether via Hotspot 2.0, SIM-card authentication, or other technical approaches, suppliers and customers alike would realize benefits of a transparent authentication process. And some progress is being made on that front, particularly by T-Mobile in Germany.
But a truly seamless connectivity experience does not exist, at least not one where billing is involved. The closest is probably AeroMobile cell phone roaming onto an in-flight pico-cell, followed by a captcha-only login like JetBlue’s Fly-Fi uses.
Typing in a PIN code is easy enough and the service is otherwise free to the passenger. This added step shouldn’t cause too much trouble overall. But it is still not the seamless solution anyone is looking for.
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derek says
I have always wondered whether the one hour starts when logging in or if you can break it up to two or three blocks totaling 60 minutes.
Seth Miller says
It starts as soon as you activate it an cannot be paused.
The Viasat system on United used to allow you to pause the connection on hourly blocks of time. I don’t know if it still does or not. That was useful for sync’ing Outlook, replying to a bunch of messages, and then sync’ing again. Less so for entertainment options.
Ryan says
I haven’t been on an AA plane in quite some time that allowed free wifi through Tmobile…all the AA planes are going away from GoGo inflight, so it makes the benefit pretty useless.
Seth Miller says
The RJs all still have Gogo ATG and the A319s have 2Ku. I’m also betting this will extend to Delta Air Lines and Alaska Airlines which combine for hundreds of Gogo-equipped planes, though I haven’t confirmed that yet.
AdamH says
Sort of curious how they pulled this off. How does the SMS PIN come through while in flight?
Seth Miller says
With wifi calling enabled the SMS is transmitted as IP data, I believe. So they could whitelist that traffic source.
That’s how I’d approach it, anyways.
V E says
Doesn’t work, I flew recently and never could get the PIN even with Wifi calling turned on.
cseac says
first time that i encountered this, it rendered the service unavailable. the sms messages with the PIN arrived the following day.
Liz says
have never been able to get the Gogo ssystem to work correctly even before this so I have zero faith in this additional step working.
Cheryl Ross says
I have a tmobile acct but that phone I use as my home phone and don’t travel with it. Now I’m shut out of using the service because I can’t get the pin. Just cause you don’t have the phone with you didn’t make you a free loader.
Seth Miller says
The official policy is apparently that the free access is for the device, not for the subscriber. It is a very specific bit of nuance, but one they’ll say matters when it comes to the access.
fly tech says
Its garbage. Flew twice, got 100 after landing.
Robert Alverson says
This is still working poorly. Just flew on Alaska and Android complained a long time about no internet. After a while it gave to pop up to connect anyway (no setting for this anywhere I could find). Still after that it took 15 minutes or more before PIN came through.
Chuck says
Same as others, no pin until i landed