How purple.com became Virgin Atlantic’s WiFi landing page

Captive portals, domains and WiFi at 35,000 ft — a behind-the-scenes overview.

Ax Sharma

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Virgin Atlantic homepage

Purple.com is apparently Virgin Atlantic’s choice of domain for its In-flight Wi-Fi landing page. But what does that mean?

Greetings from sky bar of Airbus A330! Shortly after I boarded my favourite airline, I couldn’t help but notice the crew member sneak in something along the lines of, “If you can’t find the page that lets you connect to Wi-Fi, just go to purple.com and you’ll get there,” during the safety announcement. I did not, at the time know if this was an official branding strategy employed by Virgin or something that the cheeky crew manager made up in the air. Suffice to say, the technical gears in my head started turning rapidly.

It’s clever.

After all purple is Virgin Atlantic’s theme colour, as abundantly evident from cabin décor and colour scheme. But as always, I’m here to help you understand the technical workings behind the scenes that make “claiming” purple.com at 35,000 feet possible.

In real life, the purple.com domain is owned by mattress giant Purple® and is actively used by them. On Earth, visiting purple.com would lead you to the mattress retailer’s website. This also becomes clear right after you pay for Gogo In-flight Wi-Fi and retry visiting purple.com in your browser. That’s when you’ll get to the mattress seller’s website instead.

But that should make you wonder, how could purple.com be owned by Virgin Atlantic, Gogo Inflight Wi-Fi and the mattress seller all at the same time? This is where local domains come into play.

Local domains and DNS

Local domains or hostnames, in a certain context, make it possible for network administrators to make any domain up in the air (pun) and redirect it to an intranet website of their choice, such as a Captive Portal. That’s the “sign-on to Wi-Fi” portal typically presented by hotspots until you accept their terms of service or if applicable, pay the charges. Whether such a domain exists on the gigantic World Wide Web WWW or not, has no relevance. That means a…

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