Brian K Inman

Connected Air Travel, what does that mean today?  This title, I know can lead your mind to think of so many topics.  Will this be about finding the best air travel deals, connecting others with air travel, OK the list could honestly go on for days I understand, so I’ll leave those other for future blogs or maybe your blog you’ve wrote.  This is about staying connected to the world via cell phones while traveling through domestic airlines.

Being today is #TravelTuesday and I noticed I’ve put off writing blogs for the past 3 months…my day job, the holidays, and life has happened since then, so sorry for dropping off the world.  When was the last time you were leaving your home airport or connecting through somewhere and needed to do some work, write a blog, read through other blogs, stream your favorite sports team or whatever else you would want to access the internet on your different connected devices (laptop, tablet, smartphone…)?  When you did pull out your device to connect did you:

A) connect your device to the airport wifi network
B) connect to another device as a hotspot
C) use device that already has data connection

I ask, because I’ve done all the above many different times at different airports across the country.  Using different airport’s wifi we’ve all experienced speeds that were shocking how fast and “normal” it was or frustrated we needed to send/download a few items that would have taken 14 hours at that rate.  Well thanks to the team at Ookla, you can do a speed test.  I’ve used their website to test speeds for at least 10 years I think.  It is a very simple process to test the speed of your connection.

Now that you’ve tested your home or wherever you are and the speed of the connection, now check out the list of where our domestic airports stacked up, Which US Airport Has Fastest Internet – Isla McKetta.  The link for the article is great as it covers the major airports and their speeds along with any improvements they’ve had for their wifi connections.  I’ll let you look at the list to see where your most frequent airports stack up, but my home airport, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, ranked at the bottom of the list of wifi speeds with an average of 2.7 Mbps.  That explains why I rarely connect to their network but use my hotspot to connect to my own data.  When you look at the breakdown of cellular speed, guess that’s why my ATT hotspot allows me to do work at speeds I’m used to vs. the slow wifi speed offered by the airport.

How will these list change how you plan your next layover in that slow speed airport or 100+ Mbps streaming?