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Ars Looks At In-Flight Internet — State of the Art vs. Things To Come
Ars Technica has posted an absorbing article about the short history of Internet and cell-phone access for passengers aboard commercial airplanes, which does a lot to sate my curiosity about the factors holding it back, and gives some ideas about what to look forward to. An excerpt: "Despite the volume of equipped aircraft, we're still in the early days and the continued availability of mile-high WiFi is certainly not guaranteed. It's an expensive, long-term investment to supply consistent and usable broadband Internet service at 35,000 feet. Surveys show people want access, but it's unclear how much (or even if) they'll pay for it. Aircell says that 20 percent of passengers on equipped cross-country flights use its service, but it's mum about numbers on shorter segments."
You have a two hour flight of which about an hour is no-laptop take off and landing time. There is so little time left it does not worth the bothering.
When I'm on a flight, I'm usually asleep. And when I am awake, I'm watching videos, reading comics, or reading books on my Nook Color. So wifi might be interesting on a flight, but I definitely wouldn't pay for it.
I haven't considered using in-flight internet. If anything, it's a welcome respite from being connected. My boss usually pays for it, but he loves to micromanage and so it's understandable. I would pay for live TV though. I missed the Superbowl this year because I was on a flight :(.
Flying SFO to Fort Lauderdale I find it is always worth it. Plug the power, get online and suddenly it becomes a productive day rather than a total waste.
49% of the comments will be from people who would not use this service and cannot understand why anyone else would want to ever act differently than they do.
49% of the comments will be from people who would love to use this service and cannot understand why anyone else would want to ever act differently than they do.
The remaining 2% might be vaguely useful, or they may be dumb like this one.
Since my software company is still mostly regional in nature, it's rare for me to fly more than a 1-2 hour hop at a time. It's barely worth pulling my laptop out at all since I have to wait until about 15-30 minutes until after boarding to begin, and have to put things away 15-30 minutes before actually getting off the plane.
If there was some way that I could sit down, plug in and sign on, and use my computer while the plane is preflighted, taxi, waiting at the taxiway, takeoff, and then final descent from 10,000 to landed and departing the plane, I'd be far, far more likely to pay for the short-ish hops that I tend towards.
And don't give me the "radio interference" crap - there's no evidence at all to support this and it's routinely ignored by anybody in the industry. Think about it: how many routine flyers, do you think, have forgotten to turn off their phone when they sit down, or just didn't bother? How many incidents have occurred as a result?
It's zero, in case you are wondering....
On another note, I routinely send texts while flying my private plane, which I also use for the shorter end of the hops I take. (whichever's cheaper and/or more convenient)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
And don't give me the "radio interference" crap - there's no evidence at all to support this and it's routinely ignored by anybody in the industry.
How many times do you have to be told that the point is to make sure you pay attention to what is happening around you since take off and landing is when the plane and you are most vulnerable.
If there was some way that I could sit down, plug in and sign on, and use my computer while the plane is preflighted, taxi, waiting at the taxiway, takeoff, and then final descent from 10,000 to landed and departing the plane, I'd be far, far more likely to pay for the short-ish hops that I tend towards.
I've never had a problem pulling out my laptop for the 5-15 min preflight time.
I find that 20% number hard to believe. I make the trip from Seattle to Atlanta fairly regularly and I hardly ever notice anyone using the in-flight internet. It's hard to justify if your laptop battery will die half-way through the flight.
And don't give me the "radio interference" crap - there's no evidence at all to support this and it's routinely ignored by anybody in the industry.
How many times do you have to be told that the point is to make sure you pay attention to what is happening around you since take off and landing is when the plane and you are most vulnerable.
Actually, pretty much nobody is saying that except you and for good reason: It doesn't make any sense. The instructions are specifically to "put away all electronic devices", not "put away all distractions". They don't mention and don't seem to care about books, mechanical toys, etc. While rubik's cubes are rather uncommon distractions, books are not and yet passengers are never instructed to put away reading materials. This despite the fact that a good book can be every bit as distracting as a laptop computer.
the one-handed mile high club
What you say makes sense. But I have heard this excuse from two different flight attendants on different occasions, never thought to ask why they let the book readers read books. Still I am going to believe them. Perhaps electronic devices are more interactive and engaging?
Still you wouldn't have room to turn on your laptop without further endangering people in case of emergency.
I want my mile-high entertainment the old fashioned way: sneaking in the lav.
I've never had a problem pulling out my laptop for the 5-15 min preflight time.
But then you have to put it away. Under the seat. And then you have to pull it out again, pick up your train of thought... etc Sorry, no.
Let me sit down, open up my lappie, and get to work!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Probably several more times, since he hasn't paid attention yet...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Almost as lame as this comment.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
There's a slightly different version which I've heard: in the event of a crash, any loose object is going to fly around and possibly hit someone. Electronic devices tend to be hard and dense, capable of injuring someone. Paperback books and magazines are usually lighter and softer.
Of course, neither this nor the distraction explanation can explain why you can't have an activated phone in your pocket during take-off or landing.
Here's an interesting quote: "Nordwall reports that the RTCA Committee 177 inquiry found 137 `incidents' (pilot reports, anecdotes) reported either to them, or to the FAA/NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) program, or to the International Air Transport Association (IATA). VOR reception (2) was affected in 111 incidents -- by far the most common occurrence. From the 33 reports direct to RTCA, 21 incidents related to laptop computers and only 2 to cellular phones. Navigation systems were affected in 26 of those incidents; fuel systems, warning lights and propulsion reported one incident each. Rough correlation of suspect with effect by turning the suspect device on and off was found in 14 cases, on-off-on in 6 cases, and no correlation in 13 cases."
Incidents > 0.
If I remember correctly, Thales generation 2 HUDS for A737's had a known issue with interference from mobile phones / laptops - they would blank or flicker.
operation of any electronic devices not certified by the FAA for use in the aircraft will technically invalidate the airplane's Airworthiness Certificate. so they are required by the FAA to tell you to turn them off.
Regulars would love Internet access and will pay for it. For short hop flights, where there might be 45-60 minutes of internet time, you can do some email, review a report, check voicemail, instant message with colleagues, and so on. Lots of use cases.
Road warriors have things planned out. The laptop is hibernating in the seat pocket, or else, increasingly, you can use an instant-on tablet or smartphone. Leisure travelers obviously can use the same tools. The barriers to getting out a computer and using it are getting lower.
I'm just surprised it's taking so long. Southwest announced a couple of years ago that they were putting wifi on all their planes, but to date I have seen it only once, and I fly a couple of times a month. I wish they would hurry up. They charge $5 which seems reasonable enough for most people.
The only problematic area will be phone calls, either VoIP or cell. It's going to distract and annoy people who are stuck in these sardine cans, typically with no way to get up and move away from a loud talker. There's going to be a few air rage incidents before they figure out that they have to specifically ban voice communications in flight.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
I've never had a problem pulling out my laptop for the 5-15 min preflight time.
But then you have to put it away. Under the seat. And then you have to pull it out again, pick up your train of thought... etc Sorry, no.
Let me sit down, open up my lappie, and get to work!
Your ADD can probably be treated medically if it's that difficult to resume a task.
"And don't give me the "radio interference" crap - there's no evidence at all to support this and it's routinely ignored by anybody in the industry"
I love how technology types tend to think they know everything about every piece of technology because they can use VB.
Aside from being a geek and occasional programmer, I'm also a pilot. I've also personally encountered navigational interference from a cellular phone. I think that qualifies as "evidence at all to support this". You can also refer to the link posted below that gives detailed accounts of specific interference on scheduled airline flights.
Seriously, airplanes are not computers. The rules are not meant to be broken. The rules are intended to be as minimally invasive as possible while still protecting against all potential issues. Note: This statement does NOT apply to TSA rules. They are maximally invasive and minimally effective. I'm only speaking to FAA rules regarding flight safety.
The real issue in this case is that some devices can/do cause interference and others don't. But, on a commercial airliner with hundreds of passengers that might each be carrying a potentially interfering device, the rule is that everybody has to turn them off and safely store them. Of course, the issue of a laptop being a potential projectile during a rough take-off/landing is also a concern. Short of having flight crews carry around an FCC manual and an RF meter to test every single device that a passenger might want to use, I think the current situation is a reasonable compromise.
So, basically, you'll never get what you want. The FAA and the airlines are in the business of protecting and delivering passengers respectively. They are not in the "allow some random passenger to use whatever device he wants that can potentially screw up the airplane at any time" business. If you want that level of service, charter a Gulfstream. Small, private aircraft can and do provide that level of service. If some electronic device is screwing with navigation, it's very easy to know who's device it is and have them turn it off. That's not easy on a commercial airliner.
As for the article topic, I would LOVE to have this available and would happily pay probably as much as $20 to use it on a cross-country or international flight. Being able to accomplish something with otherwise wasted time is always a win.
How many times do you have to be told that the point is to make sure you pay attention to what is happening around you since take off and landing is when the plane and you are most vulnerable.
People like you will keep saying that untill Hell freezes over, and it still won't make any sense whatsoever. In the first seconds of a crisis your personal level of alertness simply won't make a difference; neither should it, that's what the crew is trained for. During take off or landing you can read, solve a crossword, fuzz with your (crying child|stressed out cat), be wildly panicked due to fear of flying, be three sheets to the wind, eat, sleep, or make out with your girlfriend, all without them stopping you. I've seen it all on flights.
I think it is mostly security theater combined with CYA. After all, they've no real incentive to "go out on a limb" by allowing you to do anything. I don't really care all that much, I can put away my ereader (no radio) during those few minutes, but I also don't understand why otherwise rational people keep bringing up this ridiculous statement.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
Actually, they put this rule into effect NOT because of radio interference, but because of the risks involved in flying electronics in the case something goes wrong. The reason this rule is in effect at takeoff and landing is because that is when something is more likely to go wrong, and though you may have a strong hold on your electronics when things are going fine, in the event of an emergency, the last thing on your mind is carefully holding onto your electronics. That object that you just took your hands off can now fly around loosely in the cabin, potentially injuring another passenger. I suspect the radio interference excuse is 0.0000001% truth, and 99.9999999% because it's an easier excuse to use, and more apt to be believed by non-technologically inclined people, which is about 99.9999999% of the population.
...which causes a huge business problem.
The tech isn't cheap, and it isn't easy to use on the carrier's POV. So they're handing it off to companies like Gogo. Gogo needs to pay the bills so they charge users for the service. I can be amused without internet for over 5 hours, and I resent having to pay for internet access.
I'm not the only one either. It doesn't matter if your'e a techie or not, being a tightwad crosses all sorts of boundaries.
if they can't solve getting access in flight cheap enough to the point where it's free, it might stop here with Gogo taking $10 from every schmuck who can't stop tweeting.
(Don't get me wrong, I love twitter, but not enough to spend ten bucks to tell my friends that I'm taking a shit in that cramped box they call a toilet.)
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I've tried it on a Norwegian flight (2h). Low bandwidth and high ping made the connexion only good for light surfing and IM. Also, the connexion was unstable, and I experienced several 10sec+ drops.
I would pay for it on a 4h+ flight though. Sucks being offline on those longs flights.
And don't give me the "radio interference" crap - there's no evidence at all to support this and it's routinely ignored by anybody in the industry.
You may think yourself a lone hero against air flight regulations but your ignorant statement is common in nearly every industry where there is a rule which people disagree with. I can tell you radio interference is nothing to be scoffed at and we have had an oil refinery shut down traced to someone using a two-way radio in an equipment room. There are also documented cases of equipment causing interference to some equipment.
In general your issue is that the rules are designed for the lowest common denominator. Sure your fancy phone with it's airplane mode doesn't generate any RF, and the latest Airbus A380 may have fantastically hardened circuitry, but can the same be said for a shitbox plane on Aeroflot with a soviet era cellphone to go with it?
We have the problem in the oil industry too. I get constant complaints from people who think they should be allowed to use their phones in the control room, or worse yet in the refinery. "How can this possibly cause a spark and blow us up?" is the question they would ask. To which I show them a printout of a news paper clipping about a person who's cellphone exploded and set his pants on fire and reply "Given this evidence how can you prove to me that it can't?"
Despite what you may think most rules (TSA excepted) are not brought in at the bar after a couple of rounds. They are brought in in response to incidences. How invasive and practical the rules may be is often a point of contention. Saying no one is to bring any electronics on board would never fly (pun intended). But you have only two 15-30min periods in which you are disconnected.
Sit down, shut up, and do some meditation. You're quite clearly impatient and addicted to technology.
There's a slightly different version which I've heard: in the event of a crash, any loose object is going to fly around and possibly hit someone. Electronic devices tend to be hard and dense, capable of injuring someone. Paperback books and magazines are usually lighter and softer.
Of course, neither this nor the distraction explanation can explain why you can't have an activated phone in your pocket during take-off or landing.
I dunno about you, but being hit in the head by the edge of a book that had just been traveling 100 mph or whatever the plane was at would probably kill me just as much as a 4 oz cell phone or Nintendo.
for those of us in more mundane terrestrial office jos:
how many of you have picked up interference on the speakers on your PC from having a cellphone nearby? Happens all the time at my office. Cell reception is poor-to-nil in the office, and phones jump up to higher power, "Searching for Service" mode all the time. might contribute. But the cellphones couple to the audio, whether because its some resonant aspect of the wiring or the circuitry. I haven't bothered to check, but it's there. It's not a long stretch to think the same noise might appear on an older commercial flight.
Radio interference from cell phones is real.
A few years ago I was flying (privately, in a light aircraft). I was flying with a friend on a trip, and it was to be his first real instrument approach (in the rain, at night). I was at the time instrument current.
And it was a good job too. Seconds after ATC cleared us for the approach, his wife called and his phone went off. Immediately, all audio was obliterated by "bip b b bip b b bip b b bip b b bip BRRRRRRRR" (if you own a GSM phone, you'll know the sound if you've ever left it near your car radio, or any audio equipment). If ATC had called at that moment to tell us to do something else, we wouldn't have heard a thing over that noise. Fortunately he could hand over to me and I could continue the approach while he dug his phone out and switched it off.
At the very least it was highly distracting, at the worst, ATC might have wanted to tell us something important and we'd have missed it.
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The reason you can't use electronics during takeoff and landing has nothing to do with additional interference, it has to do with distraction. They want you to be able to see and hear any and all instructions from the flight crew immediately. If you have earphones on that are not connected to their systems (where they can pre-empt them), then that is not possible, and dangerous.
Take a laptop, by all means, but internet-connectivity is hardly necessary or even desirable even on a long flight.
The laptop will die before you get there, guaranteed, and most planes *don't* have charge points that the passenger can access. And yet, without Internet, you can watch movies, listen to music, read books, program (it's brilliant for programming if you get a quiet night flight), draft email (yes, email does NOT have to be sent live every time), play games, etc. If you can't occupy yourselves with a pre-prepared laptop, I don't see that an Internet connection is going to help you.
And I'd really rather not have to share a high-latency, low-bandwidth, insecure, monitored, filtered and paid-for connection with 100+ other passengers who are all either a) using wifi on the same channel in a confined metal box or b) have cables strewn about the place (which is also still infinitely less useful than just giving people a mains socket which is still *NOT* standard on quite a lot of flights).
Gimme a mains socket, not an internet connection, and I'll have my own, personal, in-flight movies for the entire flight with MY OWN headphones for myself and my companion. Hell, you can even bill me for the electricity at an extortionate KWh rate if you like. I already do just that but there's never anywhere to plug in to recharge, especially on short European flights.
If you *need* Internet that badly that you can't be without it for a day or survive 24 hours in a plane without it, you seriously need to work on your attention span and getting a couple of hobbies (even if computer-related, e.g. programming, gaming, etc.)
Actually, on Virgin Atlantic at least, they insist on everything being put away. Blankets, pillows, jackets, everything has to be stored in the overhead bins or under the seat. Makes sense because anyone not in an aisle seat will have to get past all that stuff in an emergency evacuation. Plus loose items tend to turn into projectiles in the event of sudden deceleration.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No, i give you "the radio interference crap".
I did measurements using electronics which was not designed to pick up signals in the GHz range. If i turn on my mobile phone, these goes mad.
The fact is simple: if you ask me to design a amplifier, switch, etc, then i will test it against the EMI which was specified. I wont give it a full spectrum test. when most commercial aircrafts where designed, the frequency ranges used for GSM/UMTS/WLAN/Bluetooth where not used. This means that 100s of electronic subsystems of a plane where *not* designed to operate under this kind of emi.
What is AFAIU (i am a physicist not a ee type) bad is that the CMRR of differential circuits breaks down at frequencies beyond the designed one. If you have anything rectifying in a highly sensitive input path of a standard instrumentation amplifier, then no matter what the processed output signal will be, you will see the amplitude of the input signal - even if you used the differential design to be insensitive to EMI (at the time of construction). Filtering out something like pulsed RF spikes, typical for mobile phones, is difficult it you know what to expect, and impossible if you did not even consider it. So, taking into account that an airplane has probably thousands of signal paths and probably hundreds directly relevant to the pilot.
Luckily pilots are highly trained in doing things which go beyond a simple PID controller and can recognize inconsistent inputs, and if a single subsystem fails, pilots can usually react.
Unless you have a tablet or smaller device, WiFi will be useless on an airplane because as soon as you fire up your laptop, sign up, and pay your fee, the old lady in the seat in front of you will fully recline her seat. You won't be able to open your laptop more than an inch or so, unless you forgo your tray table. And, if you politely ask her to pull her seat up a bit, she will turn into the old lady that walked across the ceiling in that shitty apocalypse movie from a couple of years ago.
The airlines should set aside a section of seats with more space between seats, power outlets, and dedicated attendants for the people who want to pay extra to work while flying. Throw in a dedicated head and free drinks and it might almost be worth it.
I have Mile High WiFi at home :-/.
Never mind the audio, the distraction in a critical part of the flight is far more dangerous.
"Flight mode" is the wise option to use when you are in the front row of an aircraft.
The real issue with the mobile devices is that 30 years ago people did not foresee everybody running around with transmitters, thus no effort was put in to shield anything. And the equipment in a lot of airliners was designed that long ago.
I would pay them a dollar or so for service if they offered it on short flights (4 hours) if I can get guaranteed service. The 'state of the art' is very slow, very intermittent service and they'll charge you $15 for the privilege of giving you an access code even if it never works during the whole flight + $0.25/minute when it actually works.
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Putting this together with TFA, why is it that the airplane mode in seemingly all cell phones shuts off both the cellular service and the wireless? If your commercial flight has WiFi, you can't use it on your smartphone without the interference-causing cellular service also being on.
Is it just me or do non-US carriers seem to switch the "no electronics" sign off sooner? No idea if that's actually true, but when I fly Air Canada or Lufthansa, even in US airspace it certainly seems like they're much faster to say "ok, you can pull your stuff out now". Would that be FAA policy or just airline policy?
Radio interference from cell phones is real.
Back when phones had antennas I used to push the elevator button by placing the cell phone antenna beside it and make a call. It worked almost everytime.
"Think about it" all you want, that won't make your gut feeling a fact. Let's try some actual facts:
http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.php?c_id=1&objectid=10701029
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The ever-decreasing row pitch and lack of ways to stop the dumbass in front of you from reclining without warning have made it impossible to use a laptop on a plane anyway.