Free Wifi with Delta WiFi. Have you heard of Delta flights’ free wifi connectivity? If you’re a frequent flyer with Delta flights, you will know about the fully equipped plane with wifi.
With the newly functional Wi-Fi providers Gogo and Viasat, However, just like other airlines, Delta offers a fairly standard package. You can buy unlimited WiFi for an hour, three hours, or for the full flight.
The free wifi with Delta WiFi is yet to be launched. But while the Delta prices are not bad ($28 for the full flight), they’re far from a bargain. Continue to read on to find out more.
Free Wifi with Delta WiFi
To enjoy free wifi with Delta WiFi, Delta flights offer a variety of ways to get some level of WiFi access for free. The first way to enjoy unlimited WiFi on your phone for messaging apps is through Messenger and WhatsApp. Next, you can send basic messages and also send images or videos. It’s mobile-only as well. The button to get free WiFi for messaging does not even appear if you try to log in via a laptop.
Another option that Delta offers is 1 hour of free WiFi for T-Mobile customers. This is not limited to messaging. You can access anything you want, from content to streaming services, with this option. As mentioned, this is a mobile-only offer.
Once you click to login as a T-Mobile customer, you’re asked to input your phone number so that Delta can check that you are in fact a T-Mobile customer. Whilst Delta can verify whether a phone uses a T-Mobile sim, it can’t verify whether or not you actually own that phone. This, combined with the prevalence of T-Mobile phones, means that you can quite easily guess a T-Mobile number.
You can only use each number once, meaning that the number above shouldn’t work for you. Not to worry though, you can either keep adding 1s, or experiment with changing numbers in the middle, and you should find a working number before long.
The above should be all that you need to get started with an hour of free WiFi on your mobile device. But what if you want WiFi on your laptop?
User-Agent Switching; Pretending to be Something you’re not
When you access a website through a browser, your browser is identified by its user agent. A user agent is a snippet of text which tells website servers what browser and device you’re using.
User agents are important because they help websites understand what sort of content to serve, and not to serve. For example, the Delta WiFi login portal uses user agents to tell when someone is on mobile, so it can offer them free messaging and free WiFi if they’re a T-Mobile customer.
Crucially, user agents can be manipulated. If you’re using Chrome on your desktop, you can easily switch your user agent to make it look as if you’re using Safari on an iPhone. The easiest way to do this is through an extension, like User Agent Switcher for Chrome or Firefox.
Once you’ve installed the extension, you can easily use it to switch your browser’s user agent to that of a mobile device such as an iPhone.
If you load the Delta Wifi portal with your new user agent, you should notice some changes. Not only will the site load differently, as if it’s trying to stretch a mobile site across a landscape screen, but you’ll also see new buttons.
You should be able to see the option to log in as a T-Mobile customer. As mentioned above, hit this button and try out some random mobile numbers.
Renewing the WiFi
All things must come to an end, and so too must the hour of free WiFi for T-Mobile customers. If you head back to the WiFi login portal after your hour is up, you won’t be able to sign up for another hour. Fortunately, though, there is a way around this issue.
Delta uses something called a MAC address to identify your device. It’s an alphanumeric code assigned to each device, which (in theory) should uniquely identify that device. I say ‘in theory, as it is possible to change the MAC address of a laptop.
By changing the MAC address of a laptop, Delta’s WiFi essentially forgets who you are. It won’t recognize the new MAC address, so it won’t realize you’ve already used your hour of free T-Mobile WiFi. You can keep changing your MAC address and, in turn, renewing your hours of WiFi.
How do you Change your MAC Address?
There are a couple of different ways to change a MAC address, depending on how technical you want to get.
The easiest method, in most cases, is to download some software to do it for you. Examples of such software are Technitium MAC Address Changer for Windows or WiFiSpoof for Mac.
If you’re feeling a bit more confident in your tech skills, you can even change your MAC address manually.
Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near as easy to change the MAC address on a mobile device, meaning that you can’t extend the 1 hour of free T-Mobile WiFi on your phone.
Conclusion
With the above, you should have all the tools you need to get your first hour of free WiFi on Delta flights, by pretending to be a T-Mobile customer and logging onto the WiFi from your phone. If you’re on a laptop, you should be able to go one step further and renew your WiFi each time it expires, giving you unlimited WiFi for free!
