Wi-Fi Coming on U.S. Domestic Flights

jvptoad writes "The NY Times is reporting that United Airlines has received approval to offer Wi-Fi Internet access on its planes. Although it will be over a year before the service is available, I wonder if this will impact the discussion on cell phone usage in planes (which seems to be centered around the annoyance of people talking loudly on the phone). Add a headset and Skype, and you don't need a cell phone to have loud, annoying phone conversations on an airplane."

Comments

Uh, latency?

[g0at]

repeat: uh, latency?

Re:Uh, latency?

[guyjr]

Not to mention IM. I'd think that'd be the most efficient way given the expected high latency.

Re:Uh, latency?

[flawedgeek]

The cell phone providers actually pressured the FAA to ban cell phones on airliners, because when you're flying within range of 100 towers, you're using resources on all 100 towers. It was the cell providers, not anything to do with navigation.

Re:Uh, latency?

[doormat]

Communicating that far away requires pointing a parabolic satelite dish precicely at a single point in the sky. That would be rather difficult in an airplane moving side to side, up and down, etc.

You do realize that JetBlue has this on ALL their airplanes, right? How else do you think you get DirecTV serivce to your seat?

Re:Uh, latency?

[digitalchinky]

Ah, what planet are you from? I er, do satellite signals for a living. Still by far the vast majority are voice circuits - although technically they are all binary when spat out of the modems. Most of these are in the form of CEPT E1's and DTX-240's (Stanard IDR's), although there are still many IBS systems kicking around - more and more frequently we see packet switched voice, have always seen multiplexed and compressed, or simply jammed into vocoders of varied size and fed over any number of transmission types. Voice is still pretty common. Internet is not nearly as common as you would imagine, though there are huge numbers of private networks that sometimes carry internet. I haven't seen any reduction of voice in my visible section of the clark belt.

airpwn3d!

[Tackhead]

> Add a headset and Skype, and you don't need a cell phone to have loud, annoying phone conversations on an airplane."

Time for serious airpwnage. No, not the kind of pwnage that'll befall you for playing CS (namely wearing a headset and being prone to mutter things like "OK, 3 terrorists to the left, one's got a gun! Kill that fucker!" under your breath) on an airplane.

I'm talking about the amount of fun you can have when that annoying cellphone-addict using Skype to escape the withdrawal... you can already hear him from three seats behind of you, hollering to his wife and kids... and then the holler he makes when he finds himself airpwned!

pretty cool

[moz25]

I guess it's pretty cool to be chatting and posting to slashdot while you're flying. It's just so much more l33t. Speaking of which... controlling your botnet from 30k feet in the sky must make it feel more special too.

How does this impact issues with interference of electronic devices? Is that problem solved to a degree that (even?) wi-fi and affiliated devices are not an issue?

Re:Okay, I give up

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Actually, people seem to yell (or talk very loudly) into cell phones because the reception sucks on both ends, and repeating things too. I don't appreciate being yelled at, and I don't appreciate someone next to me yelling.

Then there's the irritating chirping of the two-way systems. I can try to blank out the talking, but the chirps are on a different order of hard to ignore.

Ad-Hoc

[nukem996]

I was on a plane a few weeks back and we set up a Ad-Hoc network and played CS on the plane(yes sound was off). I also text messaged on that flight, phones dont do anything to planes, neither does WiFi. Anyway I think its a great idea as long as people dont use their sound.

Re:Interference with nav system all of a sudden go

[kentborg]

I've been told to remove completely non-electronic ear plugs during take-off (or was it landing?). The idea is in an emergency, when chaos is generally winning, they want to be able to shout that the front exits are on fire, so go out the rear exit--and they want you to be able to hear so you don't lumber in the wrong direction and block the aisle.

-kb

Re:Interference with nav system all of a sudden go

[ergo98]

I discovered this by accident one day, however try the following - I've repeated it on several keyboards.

-Type on your keyboard via such exercises as posting a troll on Slashdot.

-Now, dial on your cell phone, and while it's negotiating, move the cell phone near the wire on the back of your cellphone.

-Continue typing your troll.

In my instance the cell phone transmission rendered the keyboard useless, as it interfered with the communications. I wouldn't want the same thing happening in a plane. Of course having a cell phone directly beside a cable is vastly different from it being near controls or control wires many feet away, but better safe than sorry.

Re:Hogwash

[Anonymous Coward]

Well for starters the FAA has never banned cell phones in the air, it has been the airline operators and the FCC.

And two, how much about aerospace HW do you know about? Yes many of the more recent airplanes are safe but what about that 30 year old 737 with 25 year old navigation radios that help the plane land? They didn't use as many EMI protection mechanisms as we can today since most of the box was analog.

Re:VoIP on planes

[TummyX]

but the jitter as your packet is relayed via satellite back to firma terra will be enough to discourage most calls (i have to imagine).


Well, despite what most people here on slashdot would have you believe (armchair critics who have no experience whatsoever which is nothing new around here), that's not the case. I had internet access on a singapore airlines flight from London to Singapore last week. I used MSN video conferencing as well as skype-out on my tablet pc and both worked flawlessly. Using a webcam and conversing in ink while on a plane was awesome.

Skype-out worked really well - a tiny lag (not annoying at all) and perfect audio quality. Calling someone from my tablet on a plane without paying the ridiculus $5.90/min charge for normal plane-land calls was awesome and despite the fact that I had to use the inbuilt microphone on my tablet, the people on the other end say they heard me suprisingly clearly. I got a bluetooth headset for my tablet as soon as I got to singapore airport :-).

I should also note that the service had a web based live "chat" support and they were very helpful with my queries regarding the usage costs.