They also encourage you to provide info on yourself (create an account, provide birthday) to even use the screen on the seat back…
Isn’t the WiFi free? It’s free for a reason. You aren’t forced to use it.
I mean they paid for the flight
And they’re getting a flight.
Flights have amenities. Some give you free food, some free wifi.
None of it is actually free of course. It’s just that the cost is included in the ticket price.
I mean if the price of wifi is offset by showing a single ad, it seems preeeetty stingy after you already paid for a seat.
Other airlines make you pay $6-$10 for the wifi. Wouldn’t you rather watch one ad and get it for free?
You’re talking about what is, and I’m talking about what could be.
No. No I wouldn’t. I never want to be forced to watch an ad.
You’re not forced to though… You could just not use the wifi.
spirit CEO ^
I understood the mildly infuriating aspect to be how airlines find a way to extract value from you at every step of your trip.
I still open Plex and sync a bunch of shit to my phone or tablet before I take any flights. Old-school is still the way.
For real. I’d rather watch an ad than have to pay $10+ for a couple hours of wifi.
The more infuriating thing will be realizing that the inflight wifi is basically only good for texting and email.
deleted by creator
I like scrolling through the offerings because it clues me in to foreign language films I had no idea existed, then I add them to my radarr library.
Jetblue’s wifi is pretty decent. Not sure what technology they’re using but it’s quite a bit faster than some of the other airlines that make you pay for it.
At least they don’t charge like $10 per hour to go at 64 kbits
More infuriating is the forced login on the infotainment screen. That’s extremely infuriating
I once had a flight in two legs where the first leg was operated by a well known established airline for an okay ish price and the second leg was operated by a “sister” airline that did shorter ultra low cost flights. The first flight had infotainment screens and a few other minor comforts that are standard for economy flights these days and make it just slightly more bearable, whereas the 2nd flight had no screens, no food without paying separately and just made as uncomfortable as possible on purpose.
During the first flight, you could use their crappy as screens on the back of the chair in front or connect to their local network with your own device, which was free and didn’t involve any shenanigans like ads or accounts. I made use of the service which worked by entering a URL printed on the back of the chair in front. On the second leg, there was no screens and no apparent mention of an onboard entertainment offering through your own devices but there was some sort of QR code which I assume was supposed to take you to a payment portal or something but which didn’t even work. It was a different URL to the first flight.
I still had my tab open from the first flight though, and when I accidentally opened that tab on the second flight, I got access to the seemingly hidden entertainment service with no payment or logins or anything. Seems that sometimes it’s just a question of knowing the magic URL.
Wireguard vpn+pihole and you won’t need to watch those ads. Set it up to use an ntp port, and you won’t have to sign in to use the wifi.
Hold up, using the ntp port to skip WiFi sign in is a game changer. Any way to do that with Tailscale on iOS?
I have no idea how to do that on tailscale as I use pivpn on a vps. It works on Norwegian airlines and SAS, but I assume other systems might block traffic differently.
Definitely worth a bit of research to see if it’s feasible (or potentially just set up wireguard for those cases). Thanks!
Nice one.
But now that you outed the secret, we just need to QoS the NTP port.
The airplane captive portals generally don’t work if you use a different DNS.
I’ve always had to defer to “automatic” DNS and let DHCP give me the DNS address in order to access the wifi
Ntp is the time protocol, right?
I have all this, except the NTP port… Any advice on how to set this part up?
I just set up the server to listen on port 123/udp(ntp). You can also try port 53 although that isn’t always reliable.
You should be able to change the port in the wireguard config file, restart the service, and allow traffic trough ufw.
Thanks, I saw you mention SAS. I fly with them often, I might try this out. (Usually log in and then flip on the VPN)
on the bright side they could make you watch an ad to check your bags, check in, and find your seat the way things are going
They can’t be making much off this surely, how long would the ad have to be for it to even be worthwhile showing?
This comment reminds me that one time I came across an hour and a half long ad on YouTube that turned out to be a full episode of some show and something else. It was crazy to see one that long after skipping a couple ads
Is there a way to capture these pages and report them to uBlock filter authors once online? I’d like to add a filter (or better, userscript that just enables and “clicks” the “continue” button) for my country’s rail company’s Wi-Fi captive portal but the JavaScript is obfuscated or compiled from another language so I have no idea what anything does, and of course the element classes are all randomized.
So does Delta/T-Mobile
You might be able to bypass it with Orbot and a snowflake. Alternatively don’t use it.
I flew on Porter and their “ad” was just a 30 second thing about how they’re a cool airline. That’s fine, although the real cost is that they make you have a rewards account
You don’t have to have an account. The alternative is an ad every 30 minutes though and a kind of annoying disconnect (maybe?) depending on your device.
I went with making an account but the person flying with me just watched the same ad every 30 min.
Maybe they should make it so you can choose whether you want to watch an ad or pay. A lot of people will still choose to watch the ad.
Their schtick is free Wi-Fi, so it would kinda take away from their model.
Better than Delta. “We have made it our mission to put accessible wifi on every flight. Unfortunately, this plane is not yet equipped… So pay us money to connect to our other wifi instead.”
How is VPN on airline wifi? I’ve yet to try it out; I usually just listen to a bunch of music I’ve downloaded ahead of time.
