Argh this is so complicated and the problem is so silly. So one of our phones is working and the other wasn’t. The short answer is so silly:
The checklist
What was happening is that I would go to the site but there are a host of requirements to make this work:
- Enable wifi calling. You have to do this in settings/cellular
- Make a wifi call so you do this by being in wifi and turning the phone to airplane mode and calling yourself. I’m pretty sure this is because it needs to text you a pin.
- Then the gogo inflight checked mac address so go to settings > wifi and look for Alaskawifi and click the info icon and turn off private address so it can figure out you an iPhone (they don’t allow this access for non-phones). And also turn off private relay because this feature will try to tunnel to apple and gogo wants to intercept the web access
- Now make sure that your automatic vpn settings are turned off. For instance NordVPN and privacy pro will try to establish network connections before the gogoinflight can intercept it.
- Make sure international roaming is turned on. This probably doesn’t matter but gogoinflight might look like an international carrier. A theory t-mobile tech support had.
- Final thing is that you can try turning off as blockers. In the new iOS 15 you can have these and you click on the puzzle piece icon in the browser.
Turn on Request Mobile site
But I think the real trick is that the new iOS 14/15 by default request the desktop site. This confuses gogo because it only offers the option on mobile site.
They do this assuming that if you are requesting desktop you an iPad. Ugh. But finally it all works.
It recognizes the phone. It just do some sort of lookup at t-mobile. I don’t know how but you get T-Mobile access without having to type your phone number in or your pin.
