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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."
mid-air LAN party!!
Does this mean that us nerds can now join the "mile high club"?
Any use for plane to plane communications? quickly sending your vital stats, etc. or just as a log of who you have passed.
Can't wait till someone acidentally starts controlling the plane with MS Flight simulator
"Pull up!, Pull up!"
Business Voyeur
I used to look forward to flights because it gave me time to get lost in a book while sipping some whiskey. now I'll be answering (and dealing with) crap from work? I'm not sure if I'll do this; some times you just can't reach me (this is why all of my phones are off when I'm asleep).
CVS
free ipod and free gmail!
...before we start hearing horror stories about sitting next to sketchy guys who are checking out pr0n on the plane?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
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...
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.
wohee, now i don't need to wait for the hotspots in arrivals ...
Buy all your crazy japanese videogames from
What are the odds that VoIP ports are either blocked or the latency makes it unusable? The airline industry has put quite a bit of effort into explaining why Airphone is The Only Right Way to talk from a plane.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we must ask that you not use your laptop as a phone over the internet as it... may cause cancer."
Is this going to be a totally free service, or will certain sites be "blocked off"? I expect to see a marked increase in the number of passengers arrested for indecent exposure. Or even better, over the loudspeaker: "Passenger in seat 17E: Keep it in your pants. Thank you."
My userid is prime!
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.
A Flash-free website with information on Boeing Connexion can be found here.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
You still don't have an electrical outlet. Lets hope you have 9 hours of battery life to get your money worth!
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I myself am used to editing my talks while on the plane and in flight access to the databases that I use will be of great help. Can't wait to get this. Something else though - I'm wondering about in flight information. You can usually get really up-to-date weather info and so on during the flight. I can imagine a scenario where flyers with wi-fi access will know of bad weather and, possibly, impending disaster before it's being announced by the captain (who usually won't announce impending disaster anyway). We could get a new kind of panic - Airport panic (capitalization is intentional :)).
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
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.
Casual Games/Downloads
Who will be the first to set up his laptop as an access point as well as a client, to share it?
sulli
RTFJ.
The site mentions that it will be over a broadband connection. But the website also mentions that they will using 802.11b so that's a maximum bandwith of 11Mbps shared among atleast 15-20 users at the very minimum. Factoring the satellite connection lag I'm pretty sure it will go down to a crawl. Just check your emails and get along with it.
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
Old skool airlines price for business first - the passengers out back are there to make the numbers.
...
30 bucks is negligible for business travellers. Especially those who spend half their time in the air.
Everyone here is looking at it as whether it's worth 30 bucks. More to the point, easy net access reduces a major barrier to business travel. Workers are more productive, can respond to stuff as it happens, and managers can be more confident they're actually working rather than catching up on the latest blockbusters.
Less barriers, more flights. That's what the industry desperately needs right now.
Now if only the whole industry could get its act together and reduce the waiting times at either end of the trip
the airfare, which on any flight is ample
You can cross the country for ~$200. That's cheap by any standard. Seriously. how can you say that airlines are overcharging and should be adding services for free. The idea that you can get from New York to LA in 6 hours. That is madness. Tell that to the pioneers that took 6 months and spent hundreds of dollars (in 1850's money) and they would shit a brick.
If anything you should get free airplane flights with your starbucks. They are the ones overcharging. $2-3 for a cup of coffee. At that price it better come with some pr0n.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
Bah...
I'm getting decent speeds by taking three airphones (three seat wide section) and using a uunet dialup account to bind all three together using ppp multilink. I just charge the airtime back to my company!
I tried to use more phones from the passengers seats infront and behind me....but the cords are too short! DAMN!!
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.
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.
I don't think spoofing is a very great concern. The point of Lufthansa installing this is that business customers will fly Lufthansa and not BA. It's not to get thirty bucks.
OK, to do security one must think like the bad guys. So let us put on our black hats for a moment.
/me removes black hat
Only fairly well off people will fork over $30 to feed their Internet addiction - most of all the super-type-A types who cannot tell the difference between "being busy" and "being productive".
Most of those people will be running Windows, probably Win98 or WinXP.
So, if I just sit back, wait for them to get their mail, sniff the password they use for email, and then use that password in an attempt to access their computer, I will probably get right in.
Then I can Trojan their machines (for later access to the inside of whatever corporate network they use), download their My Documents folder and desktop, and see what I can dig up.
The beautiful thing about this is that I have every excuse to be close to these people for extended period times, then I get off the plane and go my own way, never to cross the guys path again.
Gosh, I am SO glad I am not in IT management....
www.eFax.com are spammers
Isn't that a bit high? Seems like its expensive to just check your spam, err email..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You may only use your laptop if you can disable your wireless connection.
I call bs, good thing i never turn off my wireless or my cell phone.
...Addressed with Corporate Revenue Enhancement Technology (TM)
Glad to see the outrageous hazard cellphones and other RF transmissions pose to airplane avionics is handily mitigated by the application of cash.
This is the best Democracy money can buy?!?!?
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.
Wouldn't 100baseT be more appropriate? A single cat5 jack in the backs of the seats, and no worry that if someone switches to 802.11g instead of 802.11b that the plane's navsystem will hiccup.
Wireless is for me sitting out in the backyard and websurfing, or walking around the worksite with my iPaq. It's not that great of a replacement for wires, it's for doing what wires never could. Duh.
I'm just waiting for Qantas (crash free since...well...forever) gets this on their 747-438 Longreach crafts. They're already putting in AC and PC power outlets for business class and progressively moving them backwards to accomodate your myriad of consumer electronics. Since my wife is Australian, when we fly back and forth it'd be great to have Wi-Fi to pass the time. The first 4 hours of the flight are interesting, but somewhere around hour 12 of the 14.5 to 15 hour flight to Sydney, you really think about opening a window for entertainment value.
Cross country I can see just wanting to have some booze and relax, but after that, it'd be nice to do something constructive.
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On left side of the plane....
Shit Bill... look at the tits on her!
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
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
When was that last time you could get more then five hundred feet from your access point.
/wait/ to bring that on the plane! "Haha, you wussies, I've got a clear signal from the plane all the way back here at the security checkpoint! Yeah, I rock, you all.. hey, wait a minute. No no, let me go! GAH! MY LAPTOP! NO NO DON'T PUT THE LATEX GLOVES ON AGAIN!! HEEELLPPP!!!"
When I used a coat hanger, pringles can, home-made drive circuit and powered by a 12v deep cycle marine battery. I can't
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
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.
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
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.