The coral blue colour (essentially just a nice light blue) is exclusive to Carphone Warehouse and will be available in its stores or online from 30 June in the UK. You'll need to get your phone directly from EE if you want the silver version, which you can preorder from 23 June. Thankfully, neither company is charging any more for the new colours than the existing S8 colour choices. Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic. We delete comments that violate our policy, which we encourage you to read. Discussion threads can be closed at any time at our discretion.
But on a customized Boeing 757, satellite connectivity means I can FaceTime, Netflix, YouTube and basically download the entire internet to my heart's content, This 757 is a test plane equipped with Honeywell's JetWave hardware, JetWave is designed to supply faster Wi-Fi for passengers and predictive analytics for pilots, Here's what I learned from a one-hour the distracted reader iphone case flight on the test plane, Many US domestic flights use an air-to-ground system, Antennas on the base of the plane get a signal from cell towers on the ground, As the plane travels between coverage areas, dropouts can occur and this system generally isn't used for international flights..
The Honeywell test plane has an antenna at the top of the aircraft that communicates with satellites. But on commercial aircraft, it would typically be installed as a tail-mounted antenna. A dual receiver in the modem lets users stay connected as the plane moves from one satellite beam to another. The second receiver locks on to the new beam and seamlessly 'hands off' from the previous one, so in theory, it means fewer dropouts. Satellite-based systems allow you to get internet over water, which is ideal for international flights.
Airlines such as JetBlue and Virgin America offer satellite internet using ViaSat's system, Southwest Airlines uses Panasonic and Global Eagle Entertainment's services, Honeywell's JetWave system receives signals from Inmarsat's satellite network, The standard the distracted reader iphone case router that passengers connect to on board the flight, Yes and no, A Honeywell engineer told me that the theoretical maximum bandwidth onboard is 50Mbps, But more realistically you're getting 30Mbps and that could drop when more people jump on the network, The upload speed is also nowhere near the download speed, but it was enough to sustain a FaceTime call without too much difficulty..
Airlines will ultimately have control over how much bandwidth to allocate to users so your mileage may vary. But even when multiple users hopped on to the connection on the test flight, I could still watch two videos simultaneously without too much of that dreaded buffering. Possibly. Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines and Qatar Airways are all deploying this technology across some of their fleets. It takes three days to retrofit existing aircraft with the technology, though some airlines are ordering planes off the line with the hardware installed.