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In-Flight Wi-Fi Makes its Debut
mindless4210 writes "German airline Lufthansa will become the first carrier to provide Boeing's Connexion service to its passengers. The service will be unveiled on May 17 on non-stop flights from Munich to Los Angeles, with plans to outfit their entire fleet over the next year. Passengers will be able to purchase access using their credit cards and Wi-Fi enabled laptops. The cost is set at $30 for the entire flight or $10 for 30 minutes."
Doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere and the Boeing site appears to be dead. I'm assuming it's better than dial-up.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I don't believe your own right hand counts for admission to the mile high club.
A Flash-free website with information on Boeing Connexion can be found here.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
VoIP over port 80. Unless they're monitoring traffic for specific packets (not just blocking ports)... then again, I have a feeling that these planes won't also be equipped with a sysadmin and Packeteer. Then again... that would explain the costs.
I had to make a call on one once, because my flight couldn't land at the destination airpot and I didn't want my fiancee to try driving through the snowstorm to pick me up.
It took about 10 attempts to get it to work, the instructions were inaccurate, when something went wrong it just produced a random tone... when i actually got it to work the call was so noisy I could hardly make out a word she said.
Worst $10 call ever... fortunately that was a lufthansa flight, so next time i'll just email.
Boeing charges from $500,000 to $1,000,000 per plane. They also spend $300M/year to lease transponder space on satellites.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
I worked in support for these guys last year while they were in beta with BA and Lufthansa - very, very cool setup let me tell you.
A few of the questions I can answer, mind you these may not be the most current stats:
- speed is like broadband, but they will not specify the exact bandwidth. feedback from 'consumers' was positive, they said it was like home dsl or cable
- VoIP worked. It was done between passengers on the plan itself as well as to/from the ground. Say goodby to $10/min airtime!
- no ports were blocked during the trial, people were running all kinds of things
As far as hacking and what not: only a handful of people per plane will use this service. It won't be too hard - if they care - for them to walk around a little and see who paid and who didn't.
Lastly, the whole interference issue is, inmho, complete bs. The regulations vary widely on international carriers in terms of what you can use and what you can't. If it were a real safety issue, there would be consensus and a blanket ban on all electronics, or all rf electronics. There isn't. It's fine. Just relax.
Oh, one other thing: this will not be used for any type of data transfer to/from the cockpit for obvious reasons. There are systems in place for that, and Boeing is not looking to use this system to replace those any time in the near future.
Last year, my partner took a flight from DC to Frankfurt on Lufthansa. The were testing IP connections then, and he was able to borrow a laptop from the plane's stash to try it out. It was suitable for doing email (yahoo web based email), but not yahoo! chat, because those ports were blocked. we were able to hold a pretty good conversation via email though. Web surfing was passable.
He was told that if he had his own laptop, he could connect to the office VPN and then have unrestricted access anywhere via that connection.
Two months ago when he took the trip again, Lufthansa told him they were no longer offering that service, so he left his laptop at home...
I'm glad to see they're offering it again. Perhaps the next trip (if they offer it on the DC->Frankfurt leg) he'll take his laptop again.
I hardly see this as a "debut" given that he was using it over a year ago.
The only ``intuitive'' interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
Two good reasons are weight and maintenance. All that extra wiring may be a small fraction of total takeof weight, but why waste it, when you can get paid for air freight or burn less fuel? Also, keeping all those connectors functioning is much harder than keeping a wireless access point running.
Oh, and installing all that wiring would require a lot of expensive maintenance time, whereas installing a wireless access point is fairly simple.
well, enough BS answers here, so why don't I try to add some more.
I've actually designed In-Flight Entertainment systems.
The main reason is EMI; ElectroMagnetic Interference. Any electronics that are installed on the airplane have to be certified as per DO-160 which includes stringent EMI checks, especially at frequencies that can affect the avionics. It's very similar to the FCC certification, except that the 'sensitive' frequencies are different.
The actual frequencies used by WiFi equipment don't really bother the avionics much.
However, in lab enviroments it was found that CD(ROM) drives tend to emit quite a bit of EMI, especially in the range that MAY affect avionics. I think this is more due to the motors (one for spin, one for laser position) then anything else, but I may be wrong here.
There are quite a few incident reports that suggest that EMI caused by electronics brought on-board by passengers may have been the problem. There's ton's of people denying this, but I've read quite a few of these reports and I'm not so sure that I'd take the risk.
I also read about a test they did with different laptops. They would use the exact same laptop, do an EMI test. Then drop the laptop and do the test again. In some cases, the drop had apparantly severly changed the EMI characteristics (possibly by cracks in the shielding) and some laptops definitely were way over what normally would be considered acceptable.
Anyways, apparently the CD drive can be a significant enough cause of EMI for the airlines to play it safe.
btw. most of the more modern aircraft (or more precisely, avionics) is far less susceptable to induced EMI and it really is not that big of an issue.
As far as all the conspiracy theories go, there are none. These rules are pretty much entirely based on what the FAA mandates. The FAA mandates this because of the numerous incident reports.
Without getting into an argument, the wake turbulence coming off of a heavy jet is enough to put a small civilian private craft completely out of control (if not destroy it by snapping the wings due to the sudden and uncontrolled aerobatics). I got super-lucky in that I knew what was going on and was actively trying to avoid the WT while on final. Just the little taste I got was enough to make me pull out and radio for a go-around.
Anyway, your small prop-driven craft couldn't even keep up with a passenger jet (even if said passenger jet were flying just above stall speed and you were at max power).
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
According to this Japanese article reporting on a Mitsubishi R&D event back that I translated back in February, Mitsubishi's dish can download at 20Mbps and 1Mbps.
There's a couple assumptions that go along with my statement though - first of all, this assumes Lufthansa is actually using the Mitsubishi dish for the Connexion service. It also assumes that the actual connection speed is going to be the same as the experimental connection speed, because that's the only figures Mitsubishi provided. Either way, 20Mbps for a plane full of people probably won't be too fast. And I'm sure the pilot won't hesitate to turn it off if there are conditions in which the plane may need power redirected to other systems.
They will refuse to allow this. None of your discussion of enforcability is relevant to what I said, as I didn't make any claims about how or if they would enforce this rule. I'm pretty sure that setting up your own wi-fi network on a plane would not be allowed, so I don't see why them having their own network would change this.
I wouldn't mind hearing why they refuse to allow this. I only responded so quickly because you made a one line comment of "Yes they can" without anything to back it up. What reason would they have to _not_ allow you to do this? What would be next? Refusing to allow people sitting next to each other to use a crossover cable or IR-link? What possible reason would they have to do this other then pure greed?
Besides my whole point all along was that you don't need to be associated to their AP to play LAN games. It's not "setting up your own wi-fi network" -- you aren't bringing an AP to the party and plugging it in. I don't see why they would refuse to allow you to do this (obviously the RF isn't a factor if they have Wi-Fi in the first place) or how such a rule could be enforced given that many laptops have internal wi-fi systems and there would be no obvious indication that an ad-hoc network was actually functional.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.