What's AA paid wifi like?

[DizneyLizzy]

We're usually SW fliers, but have an upcoming cross country flight on American. I would love to get some work done on the long flight. What's the AA paid wifi situation? Worth it or not? Thanks

 

[EACarlson]

Too much variability to give you a solid answer. You'd have to look up your aircraft type on FlyerTalk's AA forum and see what they say. AA currently has three different providers, one is good, one is decent and one is bad. Which one you get is determined by aircraft type, upgrade status and route. I was on a 738 from MCI-ORD and AA wanted $16 for the 65 minute flight, no thanks.

 

[adamki]

We're usually SW fliers, but have an upcoming cross country flight on American. I would love to get some work done on the long flight. What's the AA paid wifi situation? Worth it or not? Thanks

Most of the AA fleet uses ViaSat which has been pretty reliable in my experience. Southwest is actually transitioning to ViaSat for some of their planes so if you've used the Southwest ViaSat product it would be similar, i.e. better than the old Southwest product. Delta, United and JetBlue also use ViaSat if you've used those recently they would be similar as well.

If your flight happens to be on a wide-body aircraft (777 or 787) you may get the old Panasonic service which is not great. AA says they're upgrading those to the next generation Panasonic or ViaSat services but I haven't experienced that yet.

 

[Anthony1971]

I Have used WIFI on planes to send and receive emails best I can say is it works but is slow and spotty at times. If you trying to access a VPN you can forget about it. Your time will be far better spent if you are using files on a local drive that can be sent later.... Or watching a movie