The State of In-Flight Wi-Fi 80
CowboyRobot writes "Byte magazine gives a run-down of the current state of Internet access on airplanes. 'All of the services function in basically the same way. They provide connectivity to the public Internet via a Wi-Fi hotspot accessible from the cabin of the aircraft. This in-cabin network may also be used to provide in-flight entertainment services ranging from television network feeds to movies and canned TV shows available from an on-board media server connected to the network. In the U.S., the Internet connectivity is available when the aircraft is above 10,000 feet and is turned off during take-offs and landings. Gogo, the current market leader, provides connectivity to aircraft via a network of 250 dedicated cell towers that it has built nationwide. Fundamentally, it offers the same type of connectivity you would expect to see on a standard 3G-capable phone. The connection is limited in speed to just over 3 Mbps — and all users on the plane share this one connection.'"
Byte still exists!? (Score:2)
That the news for me...
Re:Byte still exists!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Byte died in the early 90s. Bytes from the 80s were thick as your thumb and looked more like a trade journal than a magazine. Then they decided to go for the mass market, slimmed down the magazine and it's content, and became utterly irrelevant. It's a shame, there's nothing today that matches the old Byte.
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Oh, man, I miss that magazine. Its subscription was some of the best money I ever spent.
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You can get high res scans of old issues of Byte from this torrent [thepiratebay.se]. It's unfortunately not complete, the guy doing the scanning went AWOL. But there's a good chunk there. They're also available on archive.org if you search. Still great reading.
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Byte died in the early 1980's, after McGraw/Hill bought them up. Before that, they were the place to go for articles on microcomputing.
Re:Byte still exists!? (Score:5, Informative)
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Sounds like my office.
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Agreed, the one time I paid for it it wasn't worth the $5 for the flight.
I would have loved to pay $20 for modem speeds for context.
They either need to charge more, so that it's less shared (and stop making it free for frequent fliers (who fill a lot of the vessel), and/or upgrade.
Also, latency was terrible when I had any connectivity at all (seconds), I assume this is a signal issue and resending to ground a lot.
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Fair enough, I should of said reliable 14.4k with under quarter second latency.
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You had 330 baud? LUXURY! I had 110 and an acoustic modem (ie, stick the phone on top of the thing).
But you try to tell the young people of today that and they won't believe you.
But, the situation is improving (Score:4, Interesting)
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Well of course things are looking up, satellites are above planes!
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Sure, but ATG-4 (the Gogo upgrade) is only 3x the speed, so you'll see ~9Mbps for the entire plane. Some international flights are indeed getting satellite service, but it will be Ku band satellite, which isn't much better. Eventually the planes will have Ka band satellite (as much as 50Mbps per plane) but that won't be live until ~2015.
Jetblue, however, will have some pretty nice satellite service. They will be using ViaSat's new Ka band satellite and service is supposed to start launching in the next coup
in a slow and complicated way (Score:2)
An open letter (Score:4, Funny)
Dear person who insists on trying to run Netflix watch instantly from inflight wifi,
STOPIT!
Sincerely,
Every other passenger
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Yeah damnit! You're slowing down my porn torrents!
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On the other hand, 3Mbit can do decent VOIP for a bit over 3 dozen people.
Just imagine the confusion when you bring a USB-powered Skype phone on board.
Bonus points if it's an old timey rotary phone, and you pick it up and say "hello operator,"
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it's documented on the wifi service that streaming sites like netflix don't work, so i don't know if someone tries it will affect other users' speed.
Black Box (Score:2)
I wonder if some of the connection bandwidth could be used to also transmit the flight recorder's data.
Not sure, however, if it would be a good idea...
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Simple solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Just auction the bandwidth on the plane
As long as the rate per minute per kbps you bid is > the available bandwidth, you get it. If somoene bids for $500/minute/1kbps and asks for all 3mbps, let them take it all!
How do they do it? (Score:3)
That would be a horrendous speed - 3G speeds divided between 100-300 people in the flight will make it slow to a crawl. Gogo's solution that is. Security would be bad as well, since everybody would be on a LAN in the flight.
I am curious about one thing. Previously, cellphones and other wireless devices were required to be turned off, and the only harmless electronic devices during take-off or landing were the ones that had no connectivity. So what happened that made them allow this today?
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since you have to pay for this, most people choose not to
some of us can live without internet for a few hours. so there is no need to have more bandwidth.
and if i want to watch a movie i can just preload it on my iphone, ipad or laptop and watch it the old fashioned way without streaming it
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So what happened that made them allow this today?
Money!!
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I've used the inflight wifi numerous times, and while latency is what you'd expect on a satellite connection, the bandwidth was decent and usable. For me, it's a pretty simple equation: if I'm in a mood to work, will the work I perform be worth significantly more than the cost of the wifi? In most cases, it is.
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It's not a satellite. It's mostly a set of EVDO towers pointed/tuned for aircraft not ground-based cell phone users. Although it looks like they might use satellite in the future to cover ocean travel.
The latency has been pretty good for the most part, on par with EVDO on the ground.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gogo_Inflight_Internet [wikipedia.org]
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Cellphones must be off because of FCC, not FAA, rules, so that didn't change. The devices must still be turned off during takeoff and landing, so that didn't change either. And presumably this is only available on planes that have been certified for it, so that is a change.
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Not all airlines charge money for inflight WiFi.
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IANAAEE (I am not an aeronautical EE?) but from my understanding, the FAA requires stringent testing of their equipment before it's allowed to be used below 10,000, where above, after takeoff and landing it is a bit more lax, on top of slow rule changes by the FAA such as allowing wi-fi to be used (which was likely the result of some lobbying by the industry). Most consumer electronics manufacturers don't want to bother with such testing for under 10k feet use, and even if they did airlines don't want to h
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Security would be bad as well, since everybody would be on a LAN in the flight.
Hmm.. that could provide more hours of entertainment than actually streaming a movie...
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Previously, cellphones and other wireless devices were required to be turned off, and the only harmless electronic devices during take-off or landing were the ones that had no connectivity
FTA:
And, if I remember correctly, all electronic devices should be turned off. Not just ones with radios.
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Who needs WiFi? (Score:1)
Any kind of cross-country (or rather anywhere) flight and I break out my cheap ass laptop and open up ZSNES.
I highly doubt that any of these planes utilize QoS properly anyway. So the second anyone uploads a file or attempts to sync their e-mail, the entire connection comes to a screeching halt.
Sometimes people should just take the x hour ride as a chance to relax and catch up on your sleep/reading/video game time. Lord knows that the workaholic middle class could use it.
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Re:Who needs WiFi? (Score:4, Funny)
How is a Super Nintendo emulator in any way comparable to WiFi when they're looking for a way to stay connected to the internet while they're traveling? I'm glad you can so easily be amused by your foresight to entertain yourself in such a lightweight manner, but for some people there's business to do, people to contact, emails to write, travel arrangements to make, and countless other tasks that someone would want and need internet for.
Hit up up down down left right left right b a select start and you get full broadband access from any SNES emulator.
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Your world will not end if you are cut off from the Internet for a few hours.
If you can't get that stuff done before you get on a plane, then you probably have more issues with time management than anything else.
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A lack of network access is a sure fire way to ensure you pick a game that's not reasonably completable without a faq. So many games during the NES and SNES era just didn't give you enough information, so you'd have to buy the guide or subscribe to Nintendo Power. These days it's GameFaqs.
Yes, it's cheating. But I play games to have fun, and looking around for hours and hours without making progress is no fun at all. I do always give myself a couple hours to really make sure I'm stuck.
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A lack of network access is a sure fire way to ensure you pick a game that's not reasonably completable without a faq. So many games during the NES and SNES era just didn't give you enough information, so you'd have to buy the guide or subscribe to Nintendo Power. These days it's GameFaqs.
Yes, it's cheating. But I play games to have fun, and looking around for hours and hours without making progress is no fun at all. I do always give myself a couple hours to really make sure I'm stuck.
I would agree with that for most of the NES games that required thought, but most SNES games could be completed without them. Sure, you may not have gotten all of the special easter eggs and whatnot (and yes - there ARE some outliers that are baffling without some sort of guide -- the latter Lufia 2 puzzles used to piss me off).
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They did say the
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Because nobody has ever uploaded anything or sync'd their inbox on a shared ~3Mbps connection with no QoS.
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Sometimes people should just take the x hour ride as a chance to relax and catch up on your sleep/reading/video game time. Lord knows that the workaholic middle class could use it.
The last time I flew transatlantic I was quite happy with my €10 T-mobile Wi-Fi. Allowed me to check and correct the documents that my co-workers created (and that I brought along on the laptop), save PDF copies in Dropbox and mail links to the files to the client. It all went fast enough for me, and the big plus was that I could spend the next morning sleeping my jet lag off instead of trying to figure out the hotels WiFi (which, in my experience, are in the same QoS league as airline WiFi).
Nothing
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It is not priced too high, it is priced where they want it. At those speeds, only a very few people are going to be able to use it effectively anyway, so price it high so that it makes people think about whether or not they REALLY need to use it. If it was priced low a whole bunch of people would try using it, they would have a very bad experience with it, and that would kill the service for good.
Same thing with the phones. They don't want a cabin full of people pissed off at all the idoits jabbering awa
interesting setup (Score:5, Interesting)
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...so arp or mac spoofing would probably allow a non-paying customer to use a paying customer's credentials (albeit at the expense of probably making both connections pretty intolerable).
That's how I do it. After I gather a list of active MAC/IP addresses on the network via a quick `nmap -sP` on the local subnet, I have a script that iterates through the list, spoofs my MAC address, statics the associated IP address, sets the DNS servers and gateway manually, and tests via wget for an active connection. Eventually it gets through once it's found a MAC/IP combo of somebody that's already purchased a connection.
Interestingly enough, the connection is quite stable...I'm not sure how it is
First World Problems (Score:4, Funny)
Free-ish wifi on the plane (Score:1)
My phone and tablet (Android) were able to get gmail and Google Maps data for free on my last round of flights a month ago. I was able to "chat by email" with my wife.
in other words, 0 Mbps (Score:2)
you can perhaps view one tweet per flight. sounds like the peanuts, pillow, blankets, and complimentary baggage services.
Internet on a plane is awesome! (Score:2)
All I can say is that Internet access on a plane (even with limited speed) is awesome!!!! It completely changes how I view air travel as I can still get work done.
Leased Tower Space (Score:5, Informative)
"a network of 250 dedicated cell towers that it has built nationwide"
I worked on this project for a time, and this might be a minor point, but they do not have dedicated cell towers. Most of their antennas are on towers that are owned by third parties. It's much easier to lease space on someone else's tower than to have to deal with the politics and cost of erecting your own.
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It's much easier to lease space on someone else's tower than to have to deal with the politics and cost of erecting your own.
So, it's like watching porn.
Sniff sniff (Score:2)
Any kind of encryption? Or would running wireshark for the flight give lots of interesting info?
It's nice when it works (Score:2)