The article goes into this some. It's not GoGo who's switching to direct satellite operation, but ViaSat which (as far as we know) will only be on JetBlue, some time in 2013. Ironically, what got us doing this article was when one of us was flying on Virgin and the charge was $24.95 instead of the advertised $14.95. It turned out that this was one of the planes with the upgraded GoGo hardware and Virgin was charging more for Wi-Fi on those flights. This led to an internal "WTF is going on here?" memo and this story, which we hope to keep updated.

I'm Larry Seltzer, Editorial Director of BYTE. BYTE survived in print well into the 90's and was then bought by CMP, who stopped the print edition in 98. It existed online for a while, mostly as a subscription-based site which folded in 2009. BYTE is now owned by UBM Tech, and part of the InformationWeek Business Network. Our focus is consumerization of IT, which I define as the use in business and other managed networks of products designed for consumer use. This mostly about mobile devices, and I hope the connection to in-flight Wi-Fi is clear. Incidentally, my earliest memory of BYTE was reading it in high school in the late 70's in relation to the TRS-80 Model I Level I we had. I think there was an article about Z-80 assembler.

I'm the author of the story, the narrator and the owner of the phone. I can tell you that the Wilson guys said they hadn't seen it before. Perhaps other iPhones had 0 bars or perhaps they didn't notice; they told me they weren't sure. This was an iPhone 4S BTW. We used the field test tool (*3001#12345#*) inside the box to show that in fact there was no signal there. At the very least this shows the software which calculates the bars to be buggy.