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Google In-Flight WiFi?
Google has been trying hard to be break into the Enterprise market, without notable success. The Formtek blog suggests that projects like this week's roll-out of free WiFi in Mountain View blur their focus from areas where they might achieve a higher ROI. Both Boeing's and Verizon's recent announcements of exiting the in-flight WiFi space might be an opportunity for Google to capture more attention from business eyeballs in airports and on-flight.
But highly unlikely.
But highly unlikely.
Never trust a /. article with a question mark in the title
Next: "Google may enter the console market but most likely not..."
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
When I think of Enterprise market, I think of more traditional bussiness models such as Product or Service in exchange for money. Google didn't achieve success through this kind of model and that may be a reason why they're having such a hard time breaking into the Enterprise market.
Seriously, we need to be discouraging flying unless it's over oceans. Wifi on the train could go a long ways towards making people even less inclined to use air transport instead of train transport. Even if a train is a little bit slower than a plane, if I can do some work and/or play on the train, I think I would be much more inclined to take it, esp. with the hand luggage debacle currently gripping air travel. Here in Germany where the trains are much faster than most of Amtraks, as far as I know there is no wifi on the ICEs. Last time I went to Japan(in May) there also wasn't any wifi service as far as I know.
Train wifi should be much easier and cheaper than plane wifi, so why isn't there any interest in it?
Google has been trying hard to be break into the Enterprise market
Last one to Vulcan is a rotten egg!
I've learned never to discount possibilities, and Google employing WiFi somewhere other than Mountain View seems like a possibility. However...
Doing anything with moving vehicles costs real money, and no more so than with airplanes, where the coverage has to be extremely broad, and the RF issues and internet routing are non-trivial. There's a reason why Boeing got out of the business: they couldn't make it cost effective. It's not that people don't want to send and receive mail periodically in the air, but they sure as heck don't do it in huge numbers at the price Connexion could deliver.
Furthermore, there is an entrenched base in airports. Typically in the US it's a company like T-Mobile who *do* offer decent service at attractive rates. And what do people do when they get to their airport and jack in? They connect to their VPNs. So it's not like Google can even insert ads in that sort of environment or provide searching or what have you. So sure, they could offer a service, but it's got to go head to head with others with little technical advantage, if any, and perhaps some disadvantage, such as lack fo bilateral aggregation agreements.
So, I look forward to more good stuff from Google, but let's keep reality in sight.
How is Google going to make money out of this? By "charging" people?
Sure I can get some work done in-flight, but what with the Captain asking you to switch off all electronic equipment, 3 hour battery life of my laptop and my company prohibiting VPN access over unsecure wifi network, that work will be very little to matter. I am not sure I would shell out money for that. The work won't be worth even the reimbursement request.
That's all we need is a plane full of people talking on the phone in flight.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I'm a marketeer, I convert cashflow into gibberish
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Really? By having nearly every product in a perpetual Beta state? pssh.
This is a wild wet dream of the poster.
I wish I could give -1 "Editor with too much free time" to this "article"....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It's right here: http://malfy.org/
With a decent connection and a good torrent, you could have Snakes on a Plane on a plane.
Not entirely suitable material, I think you'll all agree.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Google building shuttles, flies to Mars?
Google cure cancer?
Google invent a time machine?
Google change colors in their logo?
Google release Google Vista?
Google give up search engine business and start building zoos? With pandas? But not regular pandas, but genetically modified pink pandas?
No. They just don't. But we can play "make up a news totally out of the blue" some more if you have more time to waste.
Why not?
Hey, it is reasonable as many of the other I-wish-Google-would foolishness (also I-wish-Apple-would-buy-with-thier-4-billion-cash-a nd-design-sense, I-think-Sony-should-ship-a-uber-whatever etc.)
Let me guess: Long US weekend = slow news day at /., gotta pump those pageviews?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
About 7 years ago, I was working in a company doing wifi. We were in talks with local RTD to do wifi on busses. That is where the real money is as far as transportation.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not if the terror crap gets to the air liners first. Its allmost to the point where you cant bring laptops on planes cause of threat of bombs.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Why do you propose discouraging flying in favor of rail? Rail is not very practical in the majority of the US as it currently takes several days to cross the country. I'd rather spend the extra 20 minutes it takes to deal with checked baggage then waste 2.5 days in a seat. High speed trains require welded track rail and wider turns, so implementing them coast to coast would require entirely rearranging 3000 miles of track on several different routes. With the low population density of the most of the US, the costs would never be recovered.
Besides, you could just use EVDO, GPRS, or another 2.5/3G protocol. Why do you need wifi specifically?
Article assumes that many of the seats on a train are empty. But then also assumes that all the seats in a car are full. In fact, it assumes that a car has 5 useable (and full) seats and only weighs 2100lbs.
It baffles me that people write articles like this. Why skew things to prove a point. Make a factual article and find out what the results are as you go along.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Here is an example of an off-the-shelf broadband solution for emergency services, a commercial trucker or the ultimate RV: Magellan Ground Control Priced from $4500-$6600 US. The dish deploys and sets up in about five minutes. Instant Hotspot. But you must be parked. Coverage extends deep into northern Canada, Alaska and northern Mexico.
The Acela electric trainsets introduced by Amtrak in the early 21st century, are 2.1 tons/seat. This is ten times higher than that of a lightweight auto.
That would mean 4200lbs/seat for the train.
So a lightweight auto would be 420lbs/seat.
So that's either a 1 seater at 420lbs, 2 at 840, 3 at 1260, 4 at 1680 or 5 at 2100.
The lightest cars out there are about 2500lbs (Honda Civic) and don't really hold 5.
A real lightweight car at 2500lbs with 1 person is 1.2 tons/seat. With 2, it's 0.6 tons/seat.
This may not be as much as a train, but as the rest of the article says, the friction of steeel wheels on steel rails is less than that of rubber tires on concrete.
If you actually correct both sets of figures for the vehicle not being full, and don't assume cars hold 25% more than they do and weigh 20% less than they do, it seems like trains do okay.
And on another note, he says that cars used to be 1/2 to 1/3rd as efficient as trains in the 60s, but cars got a lot more efficient. As is drummed into me over and over from other sources, cars are not getting a lot better mpg than they were back then. And I know they aren't carrying 2-3x more people. So where did this 2-3x boost in efficient come from? And was GE throwing money away when making their more efficient locomotive engines (esp. the new AC ones)?
The article doesn't seem to add up.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
But highly unlikely.
In-flight WiFi highly unlikely?? Get it? Highly unlikely? In-flight?
Ahh..
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere