How does plane Wi-fi work

The airplane is one of the few places on the planet where you can have a proper reason to disconnect from the world for a while. But in the last few year multiple airlines have introduced wi-fi on services.This means that people can now connect to the entire world when they are 35,000 feet above the surface. But how does it actually work? Won't it interfere with communications?

Plane Wifi works like a normal mobile data network where, instead of a phone, the plane receives the signals. One compony, go-go air, uses the air to ground (ATG) method to send and receive information. This network is   a cellular radio network  that send the signals up into the air instead of down to the ground unlike conventional mobile-data networks. The aircraft communicates with the network via an antenna installed on the underbelly of the fuselage. 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. For coverage over the sea, staalites are mainly used.The most current version of ATG, ATG 4, can give a an internet speed of 3.1-9.8 Mbps for the entire plane. For this reason plane wi-fi is slow as the bandwidth must be distributed amongst all the users. 

9.8Mbps sounds slow, which is why  Go-go air has started to use a new system called Ground to Orbit. Go-go claimed that this system takes “the best aspects of existing satellite technologies with Gogo’s Air to Ground (ATG) cellular network” and that the “technology will use satellite for receive only (transmission to the plane) and Gogo’s Air to Ground network for the return link (transmission to the ground). The system can bring speeds as high as 60Mbps. Gogo Ground to Orbit uses a Ku-band satellite antenna for the downlink to the plane and Gogo's Air to Ground for uplink from the plane.But already this technology is moved forward in the form of 2Ku. 2Ku uses two Ku-band antennas, one for download and the other for upload. Gogo claims that 2Ku will have peak speeds of 70 Mbit/s

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gogo_Inflight_Internet 

http://laughingsquid.com/gogo-announces-ground-to-orbit-60-mbps-in-flight-internet-service/