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64kbps @ 40,000 ft.
jumpstop writes "The NYT Technology section reports that 64kbps is now available on business jets. Sure, you can read your email and surf the web, but can you blast away at Wolfenstein?"
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Wow so this could bring a new kinda mile high club.. Cyber Sex at 40,000 feet ;)
I would also like to announce that 56mph is now available in my house.
Also, as a special favor, I am offering 92 degrees Celsius to any interested parties.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
And I still cannot get first post:-(
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
not if your latency still sucks
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
SPEED demons, the kind who like corporate jets that do 500 knots at 40,000 feet, are reaching the point where they can cruise the Internet at that altitude as well -- and at speeds comparable to a deskbound computer's.
This month Honeywell, the satellite service provider Inmarsat and the French electronics company Thales demonstrated a system in which fliers with laptops can be linked, by an Ethernet LAN or wireless connection, to an antenna on top of the fuselage, allowing speeds of up to 64 kilobits per second.
Laptop users need a network card or a wireless modem. The system, called Swift 64, is fast enough to handle streaming video or video conference calls using standard equipment.
The first market is corporate jets, but the builders hope to sell the system to airlines, too. The companies did not give a price but said it would depend partly on how much equipment was already on board. Many planes already have some satellite communication gear for passenger seat-back telephones and for the cockpit crew to use to communicate with the airline or maintenance base.
Boeing has a competing product that is in service on 11 corporate planes, and Lufthansa is hoping to offer it on a Boeing 747 late this year or early next year. Boeing and Lufthansa have not worked out how they will charge customers. Communications experts say they could charge by the minute or the bit.
A spokesman for Connexion by Boeing, the subsidiary that produces the system, said it would allow the use of palmtop-based e-mail service in addition to laptops, and speeds far higher than the Swift 64 system, 20 gigabits per second.
Tenzing Communications, a Seattle company partly owned by the European plane maker Airbus, also provides a slower satellite-based service on a handful of airlines.
Honeywell's demonstration plane, a Cessna Citation, a twin-engine business jet that carries two crew members and as many as eight passengers, carries an antenna about the size and shape of a surfboard.
Planes with long over-water routes often carry satellite antennas; older antenna models are steered mechanically to keep them pointed toward the satellite as the plane banks, climbs and descends. The one on the Honeywell plane is steered electronically. On a recent demonstration flight from Dulles Airport near Washington, the antenna was pointed at a satellite in orbit over Brazil that transmitted back to a ground station in Connecticut.
On the demonstration flight, a user of a Dell Latitude CPx found that the Web site of the Federal Aviation Administration popped up on the screen so fast that the system's performance was nearly indistinguishable from that of a desktop in a corporate office.
Such speed offers white-knuckle fliers new possibilities: for example, it took no time at all to download a 238-kilobyte aviation safety manual.
Hate to break it to you guys, but the dot-com days are over. How many of the slashdot crowd can afford to take a spin in a "business jet" ?
I think a lot of people like me either fly on business by free upgrade or mileage upgrade. It's always better for the service to be at least available so it may trickle down to the economy class in time. Although that is only when there is a business reason to do so.
Does the whole plane have a 64k connection?
Or are we all going to have to share it between us?
And what happens when the 15 year old in row 27 loads up Gnutella and uses _all_ the bandwidth?
My Journal
I can download the latest Slackware ISO!
A spokesman for Connexion by Boeing, the subsidiary that produces the system, said it would allow the use of palmtop-based e-mail service in addition to laptops, and speeds far higher than the Swift 64 system, 20 gigabits per second.
Gotta hate this... pay big bucks and you get sweet speeds on a figgin' plane, while the unwashed masses down here still have crappy 56k in many places! Damn capitalist pigs!
I wonder if they'll charge big bucks for access, like they do with the phones on the planes?
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
Sure, you can read your email and surf the web, but can you blast away at Wolfenstein?
No, but you can Slashdot the nonstop from Atlanta to New York!
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
And then again, you're an idiot. Cox is building QUITE the high speed network, and even before they were, I consistently max out my cable modem to the cap they put on it, no matter what time of day. 128Kilobytes per second isn't all THAT bad.
What, me worry?
not if your latency still sucks :)
The blurb didn't state which Wolfenstein or which 64 kbps. For all we know, it could be referring to "Castle Wolfenstein" for the Apple II family. The Apple II's disk drive operated at a maximum sustained speed of (you guessed it) 64 kbps (with any OS more recent than Apple DOS 3.3 such as Diversi-DOS, ProntoDOS, or ProDOS).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Contrary to popular belief, the main reason you can't use a cellphone in a plane is the altitude. A cell phone will register with any cell it can reach. On the ground, this isn't going to be a problem, but at 30000 feet, your phone could theoretically tie up many many cells with the same connection.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
But seriously... it costs like $3/minute to make US calls how much will it cost per minute/kb used?
An airplane traveling at 50% of light speed in a straight line towards the broadcast satellite should be able to provide access speeds of up to 128 Kbps. Faster even, if you include the effects of time dilation.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Communications experts say they could charge by the minute or the bit.
Why not the flight? Or the day. I'd pay $15 to have a solid net connection on a 5 hour flight.
I'm looking at this from a passenger point of view, but I think we're eventually going to see (and need) net connectivity in the air.
And it should be cheaper then they think. Why go for a wired network in the plane at all? Pulling cables through a pre-existing airplane has to be expensive. A decent WAP which can handle 64 users at the same time and cover the entire cabin gives you a lan at ~$5-700 installed. Couple that with pre-existing antenneas, get a decent switch, and violla, you have internect connectivity in an average craft for a few thousand bucks.
Wi-fi is already becomming the standard at airports (even though current coverage stinks). Why not partner with one of the many wi-fi providers popping up? I don't subscribe to any of them, but if I found out that my subscription to boingo would keep me connected at the airport, in the plane, and the hotel when I landed, I'd sign up in a second.
The Internet is generally stupid
can you blast away at Wolfenstein?
:)
And if you did, would you get arrested or attacked by the passengers for wielding a weapon?
Maybe arming pilots with a plasma rifle would be a good thing. Or maybe they just need Jabber:
SkieHighPil0t: Help! We're being hijacked!
Sl33pyGrndCtrl: Thanks, SkieHighPil0t, but I'm away from my computer right now. Leave a message!
Blog,Twitter
I have had 87564 kb/s in my bat plane for years.
YAWN
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
This has already been achieved using the GlobalStar constellation:
r es s27.html
http://www.qualcomm.com/press/pr/releases2001/p
We played Wolfenstein on 2400 baud modems back in the day, what would stop us from playing on 64k? =)
If you're talking about RTCW on the other hand....
=)
Actually, the new version, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, is multiplayer. It's a pretty sweet game, and it even runs under Linux. Now if only multiple copies of the game can be used to build a Beowulf cluster...
"Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of"-TMBG
Actually, I heard that the 64kbps is the net of the 56kbps you get going west against the jetstream over the Pacific and 72kbps going with.
For information on the cost of chartering your own private jet, check out skyjet.com. The bottom line is that if you can fill the jet (capacities of roughly 8-20), it costs roughly the same as first class airfare for all the passengers.
D
While this is all cool and good, if these satellites provide coverage pretty much anywhere for airplanes, couldn't us slashdotters figure out a way to acquire the laptop PC card and any antenna(s) needed to use this bandwidth at home? I obviously don't know how hard (if even possible) this would be, but hey, if nothing else, it sounds like there is potential here for good-quality wireless Internet for the masses back on good 'ol planet Earth. Maybe even a reasonable end to Internet for rural areas?
there's this thing called a "book" which is sort of like a magazine but with no pictures and more pages. On my last trip I read 2 books while flying and I didn't get bored at all. Give it a try, hey, they even sell books at the airport's newsshop.
I'm finally going to get to join the mile-high club!
That's almost twice the speed of my the connection I have on my desktop! That's progress for you
It seems to me, with my really dorky sense of humor, that Rockford-in-the-sky-with-diamonds is funnier. But hey, I'm a loser who comments on the taglines so what do I know? :-)
You could play MS Flight Sim, and see how much faster you could get from New York to LA than the plane you're actually on.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
but can you blast away at Wolfenstein?"
I think not. I would bet that this is a pretty high latency connection to the internet. Thus, playing pretty much any kind of action game would be useless.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
Hell, anyone with a modern web browser has the software installed. Then again, GSM mobile phones encrypt their traffic (I think, correct me if I'm wrong), so maybe it isn't seen as a problem.
Nope. Not unless you want to be taken into custody for using a terrorist training program.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I still think that's proportionately not as cool as my 19.2 Kbps paraglider setup. =] No link yet, but when I get it working you'll be able to watch my flights real-time, along with what meager telemetry you can get out of a 35-pound nylon and Kevlar aircraft.
Anyone know where I can get a super-compact frame grabber? Maybe I'll put my helmet-cam online too. =]
Cell phones aren't designed to be used in the air, and you'll have real problems because the phone can see too many towers at once- fraud detection is likely to be your worst enemy. The times I've tried to call from civil aircraft, the connection has been dropped pretty often.
The title business planes, not commercial planes- normally that means corporate aircraft (I'm not subscribing to the NYT to read one article.) My last employer spent quite a bit of money and effort adding modem access to the corporate planes through something similar I'd bet.
If it's FAA approved, and it would need to be if it's installed on the plane rather than carried on, then interferrence issues aren't there- and are probably part of what's normally a higher cost.
Paul
http://www.pauldrobertson.com
"Boeing and Lufthansa have not worked out how they will charge customers. Communications experts say they could charge by the minute or the bit."
Well let's see - voice grade phone calls are $5.00/minute. I wonder what it would cost to download that Powerpoint attachment in my email? A hundred bucks? Yeah that's what I'm thinking.
Sooo, when ppl start sharing music and movies on board, what laws apply 40k ft above the atlantic/pacific? Or would it just be illegal when they enter national airspace?
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
In March, I was flying from Denver to San Diego in an American Airlines DC80. They had those AT&T phones in them, one per row attached to the back of the center seat headrest. They all had a sticker on them that stated they would be out of service at the end of the month.
I can believe this. How much utility is there in using a phone on an air plane? Almost none. Who wants to talk on a phone when the plane is crowded? How much do you want to pay to use the thing? Nobody that I see ever uses them. It must have cost a lot of money to install those phones, one in every seat. I bet that AT&T lost a lot of money on that one.
Flying on an airplane is sitting back and relaxing for a few hours. If you are on an international flight, then you are going to drug yourself before hand too, else the monotony of sitting there doing nothing for hours.
It would be cool to be able to plug in my laptop on an air plane, if I could get power and data. But how much of the populous will also want to do that? I doubt enough to make it worth the costs.
In business planes, this might be okay. So, who here is going to be flying in a business plane?
This technology application matters not.
In a side note...
AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! ! Giant Jon Katz banners! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Now we don't have to hijack the plane physically anymore since the plane has an Internet connection.
:))
Just fire up Microsoft Flight Sim on your home computer and then connect to the plane.
(Remember Turbulence III?
I wonder though, with all the advents that have occured lately, (9/11, security tightening, civil right violations that are state sanctioned) how will the gov't get there hands into this? I know it sounds slightly stupid to think, but the cautious side of me *knows* beyond a shadow of a doubt there will be some kind of sniffer running. Hell, since you can't bring nail files onto the plane, whats to stop people from just turning off their freakin' laptop and cracking peoples skulls with it? (users of Dell Latitudes know what I'm talking about.. the thing almost looks designed for that)
:)
But seriously... caution by the consumer cattle needs to be taken. I've wondered about the airplane phones for years, but at the price of those I seriously doubt anyone but a PHB or a PHB lacky would use one of those... or someone with a corporate card and no reason to hold back
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An airplane traveling at 50% of the speed of light leaves Kennedy Airport in New York City at 10:16 AM EST, and is scheduled to land 4 hours 23 minutes later at Los Angelos International airport. At what Pacific Daylight Savings time will the 40-year-old pervert sitting in Seat 37C finish downloading his first 10MB S&M video clip from www.spankme.com, assuming he is able to utilize 80% of the available 64kbps bandwidth and with the satellite directly in front of him?
With the satellite directly behind him?
With the satellite in geosynchronous, low-earth orbit where it should be instead of directly in front of a jet flying at 40,000 feet?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Give it a try, hey, they even sell books at the airport's newsshop.
BEWARE! The last time I tried this, I ended up with a truly bad novel by William Shatner. At least I hope he wrote it - I hate to think that a ghost writer could suck that bad.
On the other hand, I read a good deal of "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System" while flying (as a passenger, of course).
A dingo ate my sig...
Microwave ovens are shielded better than 802.11 cards.
You're a brilliant one, aren't you. Apple Airport cards have a marketing maximum range of 300ft. Realistic max is about 200-250. A far cry from the cruising altitude of any passenger plane. I'm amazed that you felt the need to state this "for the record."