[4] Gogo began in 1991 in a barbecue restaurant in Denison, Texas, where company founder Jimmy Ray sketched his idea for an affordable telephone system for private airplanes on a paper napkin.

By the late 1990s, Gogo had leveraged a satellite-based system to offer voice communication on overseas flights.

In 2006, Gogo was awarded the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's exclusive Air-To-Ground (ATG) 3 GHz broadband frequency license.

[10] In June 2015, the company moved its commercial headquarters to 111 North Canal Street in downtown Chicago.

Equipment in the aircraft's avionics bay converts between proprietary Gogo protocols and standard Wi-Fi, which is distributed into the passenger cabin through multiple interior wireless access point nodes.

[16] Gogo provides continuous coverage with minimal interruptions in speed, detected when passing from one cell tower signal to the next.

Gogo's connection speed is approximately 500–600 kilobits per second for individual users for downloads and 300 kbit/s for uploads.

In January 2015, David P. Reed reported that Gogo service exhibited multiple seconds of latency under load, due to bufferbloat.

Gogo has also signed an agreement with Intelsat for Ku band satellite capacity, specifically for coverage in the Atlantic and northern Pacific oceans, as well as routes over Central and South America, Asia, Australia, and parts of Africa.

It was a small horde of “data-hungry journalists on board all trying to kill the system,” said Jason Rabinowitz, manager of data research for Routehappy.

[29] Gogo claimed that the service can provide speeds up to 70 megabits per second, with 100 Mbit/s to be available when satellite-beaming techniques are perfected.

Actual speed is less impressive, as discussed in a TechTimes summary of some journalists' findings during the November 13, 2015 trials.

[31] A Gogo press release in September 2015 stated that a Japan Airlines member, JTA, was then the most recent company to order 2Ku connectivity for its 737-800 aircraft.

[32] More recently, in a November 12, 2015 press release[33] the company indicates that "8 airlines representing more than 550 aircraft have adopted the [2ku] technology for fleet deployment or a trial of the service."

[40] Connection onboard can be similar (under optimal conditions) to the experience at Wi-Fi hotspots, such as coffee shops and hotels in some, but not all cases.

[41] On August 5, 2008, Delta Air Lines announced it would install Gogo on all its domestic aircraft, which has since been completed.

By early April 2010, 437 of 540 aircraft in the combined domestic fleet offered Wi-Fi, with remaining installations expected by summer 2010.

[55] In April 2014, it was revealed through a U.S. Federal Communications Commission letter that Gogo partnered with government officials to voluntarily develop capabilities to share user data with law enforcement beyond what is required under the federal Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.

This deliberately fake authentication may be to enable law-enforcement monitoring and also data mining of secure communications[59] The company was criticized by Symantec for this issue.

"[60] It is not known how long Gogo continued the strategy, but as a news site for the information security community indicated, the issuing of fake SSL Certificates has other risks for the user.

"A cyber criminal 'acting' as Gogo could have performed many tasks without you ever realizing, such as blocking or censoring websites, capturing plain or encrypted data, installing malware, or even stealing passwords.

Gogo claims that to "cancel service is as easy as signing up for it" and directs subscribers to engage in online chat, send email or call via telephone.

[65][66] A New York federal judge, Jack Weinstein, ruled on April 8, 2015, that the suit (Berkson, et al. v. Gogo LLC, Case No.

In an 83-page memorandum and order of the case, the judge wrote, "the average internet user would not have been informed ... that he was binding himself to a sign-in-wrap" and that the wrap contract "does not support the venue and arbitration clauses relied upon by defendants.