More On Airplanes And Internet

fonixmunkee writes "as a sometimes-traveler for work, and a huge nerd, I am always excited about news like this. it appears that some airlines may start offering internet access next year when you need to get that internet fix at 35,000 feet. I was pleased when they started selling wireless internet in airports, so this is another welcomed suprise for techie travlers. apparently they want to use satellite to get high-speed connections to the planes in the air. pretty cool. " Too bad Northwest isn't going to have it for my DTW -> NRT -> KUL -> PER for CALU.

It is safe.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is safe and permitted to user consumer electronics onboard aircraft with several exceptions. Wireless-radio communications devices are prohibited because they are naturally in the habit of emitting radio signals. Aswell devices are prohibited during take off and landing.

Isn't it aeroplane

[mab]

Like the English and The Kiwi's spell it
as one of that last stories points out, they where the first [thestar.ca] :)

Re:Operating Frequencys

[Sacarino]

I work for a domestic carrier in the US, and one day while flying jumpseat to get to a conference we had one of the passengers sneak in a call on her cell phone, which somehow got into unsheilded wires and broadcast clear-as-day onto the aircraft's comm gear. It wasn't transmitting from us out to the world, mind you, but we could hear her conversation.

additionally, I've heard that the reason CDRoms and discman players and the like are banned is due to the frequency wandering those things emit when spinning up/down and the interruption it causes with precision approach gear. I dont know how true that is.

Re:Emergency procedures

[RealUlli]

I'd guess it's like with ships: You fall in the jurisdiction of the country that aircraft is registered in. Exceptions might be aircraft on the ground, or in national airspace...

Remember: a lot of ships fly flags of countries with very lax saftey laws - the only thing a country can do about one of those is keep it from entering its tree-mile-area (or was it 12-mile!?).

Example at hand: what the EU is doing now is trying to get its members to ban tankers they deem unsafe from their harbors - unfortunately only after one of those sank a couple of hundred miles off the coast of Spain with about 70000 tons of heavy oil aboard. Being banned, those tankers hopefully have no more reason to go near European waters...

Regards, Ulli

More on Lufthansa's deal...

[mudpuppy]

Sky's the Limit for Cisco Aironet Wireless LAN Technologies [cisco.com] "Any traveler with a laptop computer or portable device equipped with a Wi-Fi compliant NIC card or enabled with Wi-Fi embedded inside will be able to log onto the wireless network. As part of the service, Lufthansa will also operate a 10 Mbps Ethernet wired network onboard for those passengers without wireless-capable computers. With 380 seats, a typical Lufthansa 747 has as many network connection sites as a mid-sized company. "

Don't get too excited yet

[coinreturn]

I am a Boeing employee who thought the whole idea was stupid when they first started Connexion. They deployed this whole ton of people for the project and ended up laying off 80% of them when they realized the airlines weren't interested - mainly because Boeing wants a huge cut of the profits. Last I heard, Boeing invested $400 million on this boondoggle. They were going to charge $30/hour for access and counted their profits by counting in-flight hours of planes in the US, ignoring the fact that most flight hours are commuter trips in the one-hour range where you can barely get your laptop out before the announcement that you have to turn it off comes on.

Re:Don't get too excited yet

[Anonymous Coward]

I work as a grant recipiant on a NASA joint venture with Boing on this technology. I can tell you that the main reason why this has been delayed has been shitty modems. We have been trying to improve the IF carrier synchronization and the symbol synchronization schemes used on the modems. Currently they will lose synchronization at around 10dB SNR. This easily occurs during plane banking maneuvers. The satellite recievers are flat phase array devices which can "steer" the beam to the satellite without requiring the traditional parabolic dish. On a test van at NASA i have seen these antennas which Boening rents to NASA. They are approximately 2ft square and 6in thick and housed in weatherproof plastic. The cost for airtime on the satellite is purchased by the half hour (I cannot rememeber the price, but upwards of $20000/half hour comes to my mind) and is the most expensive part in the long run. I can tell you that the current technology uses 256 or 512Mb/s QPSK signalling on 4.6MHz carrier. Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum is used and bumps the bandwidth to 36MHz. Synchronization improvements are needed because of the nature of TCP/IP over this link. When synchronization is lost, TCP takes a while to ramp back to normal operation. A loss of synchronization can lead to a blackout of over 30 seconds followed by a period of reduced performance.

NASA grant recipient