Hands-on with Gogo's 2Ku in-flight satellite internet service that incorporates new antenna tech to deliver speeds of up to 70 Mbps for each aircraft
I just streamed Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify on a plane — all at once — Gogo, the company that's become synonomous with in-flight Wi-Fi …
Context & Ripple Effects
By late 2015, in-flight Wi-Fi had become a real revenue line — airlines were raising Wi-Fi prices as demand surged — but air-to-ground bandwidth capped what cabins could actually do. Gogo's 2Ku hands-on is its answer: new antenna hardware pushing per-aircraft throughput to 70 Mbps, enough that a reviewer streams Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify at once.
The arc since then has not been kind to the approach: [[a:865105|American Airlines sued Gogo in 2016 to escape its agreement, arguing ViaSat's Wi-Fi was faster]] and Gogo's stock dropped over 28%, Gogo later pivoted to an in-flight 5G plan for smaller aircraft (targeted at contiguous US and Canada routes), and by 2020 it was shopping the whole commercial business amid COVID. Today's endpoint of this bandwidth race is Amazon Leo's Aviation Antenna, claiming 1 Gbps down and 400 Mbps up.
First-order effects
- Passengers and airlines evaluating Gogo immediately gain a cabin-wide pipe that supports multiple simultaneous HD streams, moving the product from email-and-browsing to full media consumption.
Second-order effects
- Speed becomes the negotiating lever airlines use against Gogo: the ViaSat-based complaint in American Airlines' termination suit shows carriers treating raw Mbps as grounds to switch vendors.
Third-order effects
- If per-aircraft bandwidth keeps compounding — 70 Mbps via Ku-band in 2015 toward gigabit-class claims by LEO entrants like Amazon Leo — in-flight connectivity consolidates around whoever owns satellite capacity, squeezing intermediaries like Gogo out of the commercial cabin business it was already trying to sell.
The trend: In-flight Wi-Fi is shifting from a scarce, priced-up add-on to a bandwidth commodity where satellite antenna owners, not connectivity resellers, capture the value.