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U.S. Airlines to Offer In-Air Wi-Fi
"Within the next year, US Airlines are going to be offering Wi-Fi service onboard flights. VoiP calls will be banned initially, but the article mentions that lifting the ban on cellphones may still be a possibility. 'AirCell will install equipment on airliners that will act as a WiFi hotspot in the cabin and connect to laptop computers and devices like BlackBerrys that have WiFi chips. In all, it will cost about $100,000 to outfit a plane with less than 100 pounds of equipment, and the work can be done overnight by airline maintenance workers, AirCell says. What makes the service particularly attractive to airlines is that they will share revenue with AirCell. The service will cost about the same as existing WiFi offerings. Mr. Blumenstein says it will charge no more than $10 a day to passengers. It will also offer discounted options for customers and tie into existing service programs like T-Mobile, iPass and Boingo. Speeds will be equivalent to WiFi service on the ground.'"
Maybe you should try a bit harder to pick your flights & airlines. American Airlines has seat power on all of its airplanes.
This should help:
http://www.seatguru.com/
FunOne
Imagine a 5 hour cross country flight, sitting next to some idiot yapping at the top of his voice on his cell phone. That after having to strip down, empty your bags, and submit to a body cavity search just to get through security. That cross country road trip is sounding better and better every day...
Playing counter-strike will now be even more realistic. Imagine the kids screaming "haha, I'm going to blow this plane, you faggots!!!11" inside the plane. And the real CT squad goes berserker and pull their weapons. Pure pwnage!
Use VoIP now. Just tunnel it through SSH or some other protocol. I hate people talking on the phone as much as the next guy, but I'd make a call just to spite them.
Didn't you hear? VoIP packets interfere with the navigation of the plane. Do you want to kill us all, you fool?
The Onion said it best the last time this issue came up: "If they lift the ban on cell-phone use, they better lift the ban on passengers beating the shit out of each other, too."
I have a hard time believing that. If a WiMAX connection messed up airline naviagtion, the towers on the ground would be screwing them up whether a device was on the plane or not. Now, I know that they are not a definitive source of info, but the Mythbusters episode where they tried to interfere with an planes instruments with cell phones and other radio equipment, they showed that it is just not going to happen. They had to do some pretty serious work to get the plane's equipment to a state that it could be affected by non-intentional interference. Look at it this way. If you could crash an airplane by hitting it with consumer level radio waves, don't you think we would be seeing a lot more planes going down? Why take a shoe bomb on a plane. Just turn on a battery operated radio transmitter.