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."

Comments

Re:Wink wink

[josh3736]

I don't believe your own right hand counts for admission to the mile high club.

Flash vs. no Flash

[Big Nothing]

A Flash-free website with information on Boeing Connexion can be found here.

Why you can't listen on takeoff & landing

[k2dbk]

I've never understood how a CD player could mess with their equipment very much...

I once asked why, and was told that they don't want you to not be able to hear any announcement that might be made during those "critical" times.

Re:Whole new world..

[baudilus]

from the CBB FAQ (currently /.ed):

What is the Connexion by Boeing service infrastructure?
* Airborne system: airborne antennas, airborne servers, routers, and associated wiring.
* Ground system: network operations center, associated satellite uplink and downlink equipment, and business operation center.
* Space system: leased satellite transponders.

It looks like they do use satellites, but they also seem to have ground NOC's and antennae. They don't say which is used for what, but it's safe to assume that it won't be as fast as my optonline connection :D

Re:Have you ever used an Airphone

[nacturation]

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...

Next time that happens, call your credit card company and reverse the charges due to "service not as advertised". Lufthansa (or whoever provides the service) will then have to eat the cost of the call. If more and more people do this, it'll force them to either drop the service (due to chargeback costs) or improve the quality.

Re:Entirely bizarre - why not Ethernet?

[mean pun]

Given that each seat already has a myriad of cabling going to it, I simply can't see why they've opted for WiFi connectivity - other than as a gimmic.

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.

Re:Whole new world..

[Shakrai]

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.