Virgin America held it’s inaugural Aircell GoGo WiFi flight yesterday. The in-air Internet service has already been in place via Delta, American and Air Canada but this is Virgin’s first foray. Virgin promises 100% of their American flights will use the GoGo service by April.

Here are some stats by folks who had the pleasure of attending the sky borne event:

* The connection clocks in at 3.6Mbps downstream and 1.8Mbps upstream.
* Latency is between 200-500ms.
* The system uses 802.11a/b/g, with an open AP.
* The company blocks voice and video chat to keep things less obnoxious for your fellow man.
* BitTorrent and similar programs work.
* Virgin America will not be filtering content.

Below is a short video explaining how the system works. The future is here, finally:

Yes, my Tablet PC fetish is showing again. This time, it’s a bit of an industrial-use type of report, in that it’s about Virgin Airlines flight attendants using the quite nifty Motion Computing LE1600 Tablet PC to organize their wonderful passenger service. To me, it’s an example of Tablet PC’s becoming more mainstream, which is a good thing as far as I’m concerned.