Testing American Airlines' new — and massively improved — regional jet Wi-Fi

06.03.2025 - 21:15 / thepointsguy.com

Historically, flying on a regional jet meant you'd be disconnected until you landed.

Those days, however, are about to be a distant memory — especially if you're flying on American Airlines.

In late 2023, the carrier announced that it would install satellite-based Wi-Fi service across nearly 500 American Eagle regional jets. This includes the following two-class jets: Bombardier CRJ-700, Bombardier CRJ-900, Embraer E170 and Embraer E175. Unfortunately, the Bombardier CRJ-200 and the Embraer E145, which don't currently offer Wi-Fi, still won't receive internet service.

While the rollout started last year and is still very much ongoing, I scored an amazing upgrade on a recent flight from Philadelphia to Nashville. (And no, I'm not talking about my first complimentary first-class upgrade as an AAdvantage Executive Platinum member in nearly six months.)

As I approached the gate and looked at the Embraer E175 waiting to fly me down to Nashville, I noticed something strange about the top of the fuselage. The jet appeared to have a flat satellite radome at the back near the tail, my first indication that this would be an American Eagle regional flight like no other.

Once inside, I asked the flight attendant if the plane might have the new Wi-Fi experience. Her reply? "All I know is that I usually hear lots of complaints about internet access on these planes."

My hopes briefly dashed, I quickly connected to aainflight.com, American's Wi-Fi landing page — and voila. I scrolled to the bottom and confirmed that this jet, an 11-year-old Embraer E175 registered N422YX, had indeed been upgraded with an Intelsat antenna.

And then, as a self-proclaimed techie, I decided to spend the next 90 minutes putting the new Wi-Fi service through the paces.

The first step was actually connecting to the internet. Though American has done a great job bringing faster and more reliable connectivity to the skies, its Wi-Fi pricing scheme is still one of the most expensive in the domestic skies. A flight pass for my short hop to Nashville was $20 or 3,100 miles. On Delta Air Lines, it would have been free, and on United Airlines, it would have cost $8. (Maybe one day American will also introduce free Wi-Fi, but right now, the carrier is only testing such a concept.)

After forking over $20, I started with a simple speed test to determine what I was working with. Download speeds consistently hovered around 10 Mbps, and upload speeds clocked in around 4 Mbps. The latency, measured by ping, was nearly 700 milliseconds.

Those numbers might not mean much to you, but to me, they indicated that the service should be able to handle video streaming and uploading high-definition content. With such a high latency (which measures how long it