I'm posting this from an Air New Zealand 777-200 half way between SYD and AKL.

Air NZ have now launched their In Flight Wi-Fi service. My first impressions are that its pretty good! I started to get excited when I was standing at the boarding gate in SYD and an Alert Popped up on my phone through the Air NZ APP: "Wi-Fi Service is Available on your Aircraft"

Now available on most 777's and soon to be rolled out on the 787's. You can find more info in the AirNZ Website here: https://www.airnewzealand.co.nz/wifi 

The service is $15 NZD for all you can eat with no data caps which is pretty amazing for a satellite service. This allows you to connect only 1 device for your $15 bucks.

Note to self: Bring a pocket Wi-Fi router next time so I can NAT and share the connection between all my devices ;-)

You can pay using credit card or AirPoints Dollars. Or though I tried paying using Air Points and there seems to be some kind of back end problem.

Backhaul is provided from Inmarsat with their satellite service, latency is around 700ms as you would expect from satellite; and bandwidth is pretty good. I was able to get 15mb/sec down and 1mb/sec up on a speedtest.net test. With Inmarsat being UK based most geolocation services recognise the public IP address as being in the UK. I'm not sure if i'm rate limited at 15mb/sec or if this is the total amount of bandwidth available to everyone on board.

While the service has no data or time limits there is a content filter which blocks things like Netflix and playboy.com type sites or though Youtube is allowed. Haha.. I guess its not cool to have the guy in the seat next door to you sitting there watching his favourite adult movie ;-) And there is an IFE system so why do you need NetFlix anyway?

I'm a Wi-Fi guy: It looks like they are using HPE Aruba Access Points on board and IMO have done a good job with AP distribution and setup. I count 5 x 3x3 Dual Band Access Points aboard this 777-200. And as you would expect there are no DFS channels in use ;-)

It looks like this service is only being rolled out in international routes for now; As someone who does about 8-10 International Flights a year and about 10-12 domestic flights a month I would really love to see this on domestic routes too. Or though I can see it would be hard to build a business case to roll out InFlight Wi-Fi across the A320 fleet where the longest flight inside NZ is less than 2 hours.

Great Job Air NZ. Its taken a while but you have delivered a great service.