Passenger Becomes A Wi-Fi Robin Hood—Buys One Pass, Offers Everyone Free Inflight Internet

Wi-fi Robinhood flew Air Canada, bought one internet pass, and used a $79 router to offer free connections to everyone. Posts from the aeroplan community on Reddit The Air Canada passenger bought the airline’s streaming internet package and turned himself into a micro ISP. He plugged a $79 UniFi Travel Router into a power bank, connected it to Air Canada’s ACWiFi.com network, authenticated it through the captive portal and created an open hotspot for the rest of the cabin. This little travel router from UniFi works really well with the onboard wifi. I set it up with a free open AP for everyone to use and the children are contented. The display in the photo he shared shows three devices connected. He says as many as five people joined at once, with only a few dropouts and slowdowns on the premium plan (plus a brief satellite outage over the ocean). The travel router joins the aircraft network just as a phone or laptop would. The passenger signs into Air Canada’s captive portal through the UniFi app, and the internet session is associated with the router. Every phone and laptop connected behind goes through that one connection like a router at home. Of course there are reasons to do this even without sharing your internet connection with strangers. You can connect a laptop, phone and tablet at the same time. You can cover your whole entire family with one wifi purchase. Air Canada does have free wifi on much of its fleet – within North America and to Mexico and the Caribbean. On most long haul, Aeroplan members still receive only free messaging. Air Canada’s connectivity page promises this goes free “in 2026.” The new Airbus A321XLR, though, offers free wifi even on long haul routes. There are still two A320s and three Boeing 787-9s that are dark, along with Q400s outside of nine serving Toronto Billy Bishop. Normally you’re only allowed to use one device per purchase. If you log in with a second device, the first one disconnects and the session transfers. Here, the route places all the devices behind a single login. That’s actually against the terms of the service which prohibit sharing connections or authorizing someone else to use your connection. The wifi service terms say that the service is personal and non-transferable and limited to one device with no sharing of a connection. Air Canada also publishes a a rule against radio transmitters which is odd considering that phones and laptops are allowed to inflight wifi. A passenger operating their own wireless access point still might run afoul of this. In 2016 I wrote about using a HooToo nano router to connect several devices to one Gogo session. It was annoying to keep moving a connection between my laptop and phone, and hotels still commonly imposed device limits. That’s different from bringing a personal Starlink terminal onto a Delta flight. That passenger was attempting to provide the connection to space. Here the passenger is merely redistributing the internet the aircraft already receives. My first attempt to get Starlink working on this Delta flight a failure thus far pic.twitter.com/ECys107dfD — Ryan Petersen (@typesfast) November 12, 2024 Thirty years ago I hosted open connections because in my early naive utopian days I thought the web would be open and transformational. I had a $3.99 per month connection that came with ads, I disabled the ads, and made it available to anyone within range. Of course back then there wasn’t much worry over security. And while encrypted connections mean that a network host isn’t necessarily seeing transmitted passwords, you are sharing metadata and could face phishing or other attacks. Topics on this page