The news is out. Gogo wifi is slow. I’m surprised it actually took this long for someone to do something about the extremely slow Gogo wifi onboard most planes these days.

As many of you business travelers know, business travelers boot up and log onto Gogo within minutes of taking off. You have a few minutes of good wifi, then when everyone else joins, the wifi speed slows from a crawl to worse than AOL dialup speed. 

The Star Telegram has the details of the lawsuit filed in Texas this week. 

“After carefully evaluating the new technology and services in the marketplace, American has decided to exercise its rights under the Agreement and recently notified Gogo that ViaSat offers an in-flight connectivity system that materially improves on Gogo’s air-to-ground system

The lawsuit basically says that American can terminate their contract with Gogo if the airline finds another wifi carrier. In this case, American found ViaSat. 

Looks like American is making a move with their wifi carrier. Not sure if they will go through with it or if it’s just a play to get Gogo to roll out their faster service (see details at Tech Crunch), but the market is suggesting they’ll make some move as Gogo’s share price is down 27% today.

I feel American’s pain, and if Gogo doesn’t improve I’d hope Delta follows their path for once to improve their inflight wifi speed.

What are your thoughts on the two major inflight wifi services and which do you prefer?

Update: head on over to Wandering Aramean for additional detail.