Flying High With Gemini

So here I am on an airplane flying from Istanbul to Los Angeles. I thought it would be fun to take the opportunity to post on Gemini while I'm thousands of feet in the air. Bubble is the most convenient way to do so on my phone, although I could get out my laptop I can't be bothered.

The flight came with some form of free WiFi, which is a shock to me because last year they wanted to charge an arm and a leg for it. The terms of service seem to have gotten a lot better, with lower cost packages back down to what I remember them being 10 years ago, and a longer duration of use, I think. (The flight is 12 hours and I have 24 hours of service.)

I don't know if it's because the flight had a long delay and they wanted to give free Internet to us (probably not), but I can connect to everything despite the service being billed as "messaging only".

I thought "messaging only" meant there was a firewall that blocks all traffic except WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. I experienced that in the US before with a domestic carrier.

To my pleasant surprise, everything works, including XMPP and Gemini. It seems what they mean by messaging service is that the user's connection speed is severely limited to the point where messaging is the only comfortable thing you can do. Otherwise, the low speed would be excruciating and likely cause things like websites to fail. No chance of streaming video, but for the Gemini user any speed is an acceptable speed. No problem here!

👤 benk

2023-06-01 · 1 year ago · 👍 sirwilburthefirst, senders, eph, PikaSonic, jmjl

3 Comments ↓

🚀 senders · 2023-06-01 at 13:00:

Amazing! So rare to have serviceable internet on a flight. but this is where gemini shines! for a long flight like that it's the least they could do though.

👤 benk [OP] · 2023-06-01 at 13:55:

@senders Indeed, but it was awful last year. They wanted to charge a lot more to use the Internet or a severely limited data package, and I hacked it by buying the small package and connecting even after the quota ran out. Apparently the firewall would open during attempted logins so I had to just keep pressing login and getting the error until XMPP or something opened a connection to the server. Once opened it stayed open. Glad not to deal with that now

☯️ eph · 2023-06-02 at 12:30:

I've also had great success with Gemini and messaging-only airplane WiFi!