Virgin America In-Flight WiFi Internet Review

I had the good fortune to be on a Virgin America cross country flight recently from Fort Lauderdale (FLL) to Los Angeles (LAX). At the time, Google was sponsoring the inflight WiFi internet access and it was available for free to all Virgin America passengers.

I took the time to run some internet speed tests and also evaluate how well it worked for things like reading email, researching our destinations, viewing pictures on Flickr and watching videos on Hulu.com or YouTube.com.

Virgin America WiFi Hulu

I was able to watch most of a “Scrubs” episode on Hulu.com, but only at the lowest quality setting and with several pauses to allow the video buffer to fill completely. I had a couple of DVDs with me, so I wasn’t too worried about having to use the Virgin America WiFi for entertainment. Plus each seat came with its own media center console.

Virgin America WiFi SpeedTest.net Results

The Virgin America WiFi system scored a respectable 0.27Mb/s download speed and 0.30Mb/s upload speed on SpeedTest.net. It was more than enough speed for my casual emailing, surfing, viewing optimized pictures, and very limited video viewing.

Virgin America WiFi Toast.net Speed Test Results

At Toast.net, the Virgin America WiFi scored an ever better 3306 Kb.

I usually cherish my time on planes for finally being able to disconnect myself from the internet and watch some movies in peace. But if you need to get online at 30,000 feet in the air, the $5.95 to $12.95 per flight (depending on the length) is worth the cost for this convenient service.