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

Plane 2 Plane

[SirChris]

Any use for plane to plane communications? quickly sending your vital stats, etc. or just as a log of who you have passed.

Interference

[RobPiano]

I would love to have wifi on a long flight and $30 isn't completely unreasonable for a flight from Germany to California. This is all fine, but can someone explain to me if we can have wifi on a flight, why can't I have my CD player turned on when the plane first takes off? I've never understood how a CD player could mess with their equipment very much, but I can imagine wifi being a bit of a problem...

Re:Interference

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to forget all you know about normal regulations. If there is one industry, one type of transportation where people take things seriously then it's aviation. The laws, regulations and technical specs can only be described as anal. Here's an example. You know those glow stripes on the floor that show you the emergency exit? They used to use little lightbulbs for that. If one of those bulbs was defective, the plane was not allowed to take off.

There's a reason why air travel is so safe.

The reason they ban electronics is quite simple. First of all, they prohibit them just to make sure. Sometimes, some devices may actually have an influence on on-board electronics, but even so it won't be serious (insta-planecrash). They're playing it safe. And take-off and landing are the two "critical" phases of a flight. If something happens during cruise, the plane won't it the ground for a while and might yet be saved. But when you approach the runway and something goes wrong, then your chances of smacking into the ground at a high speed are pretty good.

Now, the wifi for the cbb/lufthansa project underwent extremely rigid testing. The gov't departments responsible for it basically tested the stuff way beyond specification (one quote was, "with enough transmitting power that the wifi would have burned out the CPUs"). And their conclusion was: it's safe.

I do trust that. I wish I could trust all things in this world as much as I can trust airtravel :)

stealing the connection

[jridley]

I can see people who don't want to pay for the connection sniffing someone's traffic, then cloning their MAC address and surfing for free after the guy switches off.

Re:stealing the connection

[Progman3K]

What about proxying?

If you're flying with office mates, one buys service time, and proxies the other(s).

Re:Whole new world..

[frenetic3]

Anyone know what the latency (ping times) would be on the Connexion service? Would it be like satellite (hundreds of ms?) (I know parent was referring to the plane's LAN in which latency is negligible, but what about communications to the rest of the world?)

-fren

Hiring Security techs

[Anonymous Coward]

Just interviewed there about 2 months ago for an IDS system. It was currently put on hold (after the interview process btw), but from what I hear they have an IDS guy leaving or switching roles. If you live in seattle and don't mind working down by boeing field, would be a cool company to work for. Usually they're looking for CISSP / GIAC's. From what they told me, this should be rolled out to a huge consortum of airlines by the end of 2004. Will be interesting to see how this roles out, as another company in Seattle is there largest competitor, who rolled out the service previously.

Re:How long

[drinkypoo]

put two wifi cards in your laptop and run an open "ap", and everyone with you (or optionally, everyone) can use the service for the price of just you.

Good way for the airlines to make more money

[strictnein]

I see this as a good way for airlines to make more money. Having recently flown Frontier and enjoyed the 22 (or so) channel satellite TV service (that I paid a nominal $5 charge for - and was free until after take off) I welcome many options like this for the airlines. I do admit that $30 is pretty steep for something like this. I'm not a penny pincher by any means, but I would find it tough to cough up the cash for this. I would, however, easily plunk down $15 for this service.

I'm also happy the airlines have been increasingly moving towards charging for inflight meals as it's something I've thought they should have done long again. Instead of everyone, no matter if you're hungry or not, getting plain awful food, those who wish to pay a reasonable price actually get good food.

Entirely bizarre - why not Ethernet?

[Angostura]

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.

After all I guess 90% of laptops have Ethernet ports, and what - 40% have Wifi?

So they have a smaller potential audience, plus the issues of RF engineering, interference, security, contention etc.

So gimmic it is, unless anyone has some better ideas.

Re:Whole new world..

[Shakrai]

mid-air LAN party!!

I'm sure your just joking around to get your +5 funny FP but in all seriousness why would you pay Lufthansa $30 to have a mid-air LAN party? If you wanted to have a LAN party (not a bad idea on a eight hour+ flight -- I'd do it if I had a few friends tagging along with me) and they allow Wi-Fi on the plane then why not setup your own Ad-Hoc network that doesn't cost you anything? Unless you need access to the Internet (which you won't for a LAN Party) why give them the money?

That's a pretty interesting idea too. If they are going to allow you to broadcast in the 2.4Ghz range on the airplane then they can't refuse to let you do this. Could be interesting on those long flights. Now your only problem is how long your battery will last :)

Another (slightly evil) idea would be to have one person buy the Internet access and then share it with the rest of his buddies using a second wireless NIC and the aforementioned ad-hoc network. I wonder if they'd get peeved if you did this? Kinda doubt they'd find out but what's the worst they could do? Boot you off? Something tells me that the crew has better things to do then monitor the Wi-Fi network to make sure you aren't sharing it.

Re:How long

[Mycroft_VIII]

Then again, the airlines used to offer phone service on planes, and that cost some incredible amount too...

Very expensive. My dad was flying home from visiting relatives in another state his sister (A travel agent so he got good ticket prices at least) with him on till the connectecting flight.
Well he uses the phone to talk this pretty lady he'd met and after a couple of minute my aunt starts waving the little info brochure at hime and says somthing like "that's getting to be an expensive phone call".
My Dad kinda brushes her off saying somthing like "I know" and spends 20+minutes on the air-phone with my aunt giving more and more incredulous looks.
No he figures it's gonna cost alot, like 35-45 dollars. My aunt says somthing like "she must have made some kind of impression". He "replies oh $45 or so isn't That much" that's when she shows him the price/minute in the brochure. It's not good to shock a man that badly when he's already had one heart attack. The bill was over $300.
Moral of the story, when someone who knows how much your spending looks at you like your crazy, find out why!

Mycroft

Re:How long

[another_henry]

I've fallen asleep every night (more or less) for the last six months since I got 802.11g with my laptop right next to my head on my bedside table. I don't wake up with a headache.

Microwaves do not cause biological damage unless you have hundreds of watts of them, and that's just heat.

It's really not physically possible. The frequency is too low to cause any ionising effects, leaving the only possible effect as heating, and I think that you get much more heating from say the hard drive in your laptop than you do from the 1W WiFi.