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Heathrow now has genuinely super-fast free wi-fi

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Heathrow Airport has just announced a brand new super-fast free wi-fi service.

I know what you’re thinking ….. fast wi-fi, blah, blah, usual marketing spiel.  Except …

I was in Heathrow on Tuesday morning on my way to Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg, so I thought I would try it out.  The results were pretty shocking.

This is what I got on my iPhone on the upper level of Terminal 5, just outside the British Airways Galleries North lounge:

Yes, 74 Mbps download speed.  Even more amazingly, 72 Mbps upload speed.

I thought I would give it a tougher test, so I went downstairs to the lower level to the most concentrated area of seating around gate A10.  Even here, it hardly flinched:

As I was heading towards the Galleries First lounge, I tried it again on the lower level by the escalators, next to Smythson and Fortnum & Mason:

This was the best of lot – over 80 Mbps for both uploading and downloading.  This is very impressive, to put it mildly.  It is very close to the ‘up to 100 Mbps’ figure which Heathrow is quoting in its press release.

For those who understand how this stuff works:

“The new service uses Passpoint2 technology to deliver a next generation, secure Wi-Fi experience and will enable travellers to seamlessly roam between Wi-Fi and cellular for a better-connected experience. Investments have been made to upgrade the wireless network across the airport, ensuring bandwidth capacity, and Boingo has installed two new high-speed internet links at the airport as part of the service overhaul.”

All credit to Heathrow for getting this up and running – let’s hope a few more UK airports follow suit.

Comments (31)

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  • Geoff says:

    I’m sat I the T5 Aspire lounge and got 11.5 down and 22.5 up. Might switch to the lounge network to see if it’s any better

    • Crafty says:

      Why would you possibly need more than this at an airport?

      • Lady London says:

        Because at low mbps thé signal is often patchy and variable as well.

        You just try opening any ‘loaded’ attachement or even a modérateexcel file that miht be attachéd to an email if you:ve only got low mbps.

        • Alex Sm says:

          Are you French, @LadyLondon?

        • Lady London says:

          Working on a project in France ATM and the phone I use most has to be a French setup for the duration of the project. Really annoying as I don’t always catch all the edits it does….. You may have noticed 🙂

        • Alan says:

          Haha – @LadyLondon, not sure if Swiftkey is an option for you or not (it is on Android), but it lets you easily switch keyboards between languages 😀 (can be handy for Duolingo)

  • Derek Broughton says:

    Still disappointed to find that they want access to either my Twitter or Facebook accounts, or to give them personal details directly. In Canadian airports, I always get decent WiFi without doing anything more than clicking a button.

  • AllezAllezAllez says:

    Used it yesterday and it was strong enough to watch Sky Sports on my iPad at the T5 bus zone.

  • ht says:

    I work at T5 and the speeds are painfully slow, was better off paying for the premium speeds

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