The State of In-Flight Wi-Fi

CowboyRobot writes "Byte magazine gives a run-down of the current state of Internet access on airplanes. 'All of the services function in basically the same way. They provide connectivity to the public Internet via a Wi-Fi hotspot accessible from the cabin of the aircraft. This in-cabin network may also be used to provide in-flight entertainment services ranging from television network feeds to movies and canned TV shows available from an on-board media server connected to the network. In the U.S., the Internet connectivity is available when the aircraft is above 10,000 feet and is turned off during take-offs and landings. Gogo, the current market leader, provides connectivity to aircraft via a network of 250 dedicated cell towers that it has built nationwide. Fundamentally, it offers the same type of connectivity you would expect to see on a standard 3G-capable phone. The connection is limited in speed to just over 3 Mbps — and all users on the plane share this one connection.'"

Comments

Byte still exists!?

[Anonymous Coward]

That the news for me...

Re:Byte still exists!?

[Hatta]

Byte died in the early 90s. Bytes from the 80s were thick as your thumb and looked more like a trade journal than a magazine. Then they decided to go for the mass market, slimmed down the magazine and it's content, and became utterly irrelevant. It's a shame, there's nothing today that matches the old Byte.

Re:Byte still exists!?

[stox]

Byte died in the early 1980's, after McGraw/Hill bought them up. Before that, they were the place to go for articles on microcomputing.

Re:Byte still exists!?

[lseltzer]

I'm Larry Seltzer, Editorial Director of BYTE. BYTE survived in print well into the 90's and was then bought by CMP, who stopped the print edition in 98. It existed online for a while, mostly as a subscription-based site which folded in 2009. BYTE is now owned by UBM Tech, and part of the InformationWeek Business Network. Our focus is consumerization of IT, which I define as the use in business and other managed networks of products designed for consumer use. This mostly about mobile devices, and I hope the connection to in-flight Wi-Fi is clear. Incidentally, my earliest memory of BYTE was reading it in high school in the late 70's in relation to the TRS-80 Model I Level I we had. I think there was an article about Z-80 assembler.

But, the situation is improving

[GeneralSecretary]

GoGo is in the process of upgrading their networks. They are also working on switching from air-to-ground networks to satellite which will allow them to provide coverage over oceans. Newer planes are being built with WiFi in mind. Things are looking up.

Re:But, the situation is improving

[ArcadeMan]

Well of course things are looking up, satellites are above planes!

Re:But, the situation is improving

[lobos]

Sure, but ATG-4 (the Gogo upgrade) is only 3x the speed, so you'll see ~9Mbps for the entire plane. Some international flights are indeed getting satellite service, but it will be Ku band satellite, which isn't much better. Eventually the planes will have Ka band satellite (as much as 50Mbps per plane) but that won't be live until ~2015.

Jetblue, however, will have some pretty nice satellite service. They will be using ViaSat's new Ka band satellite and service is supposed to start launching in the next couple months. And it's free. United's Continental fleet will also be getting this service as they have contracted for it through Jetblue's wholly owned LiveTV.

An open letter

[jeffmeden]

Dear person who insists on trying to run Netflix watch instantly from inflight wifi,

STOPIT!

Sincerely,
Every other passenger

Re:An open letter

[ArcadeMan]

Yeah damnit! You're slowing down my porn torrents!

Re:An open letter

[jeffmeden]

On the other hand, 3Mbit can do decent VOIP for a bit over 3 dozen people.
Just imagine the confusion when you bring a USB-powered Skype phone on board.

Bonus points if it's an old timey rotary phone, and you pick it up and say "hello operator,"

Simple solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Just auction the bandwidth on the plane
As long as the rate per minute per kbps you bid is > the available bandwidth, you get it. If somoene bids for $500/minute/1kbps and asks for all 3mbps, let them take it all!

How do they do it?

[unixisc]

That would be a horrendous speed - 3G speeds divided between 100-300 people in the flight will make it slow to a crawl. Gogo's solution that is. Security would be bad as well, since everybody would be on a LAN in the flight.

I am curious about one thing. Previously, cellphones and other wireless devices were required to be turned off, and the only harmless electronic devices during take-off or landing were the ones that had no connectivity. So what happened that made them allow this today?

Re:How do they do it?

[SailorSpork]

Nothing changed. As always, you can turn electronics back on after a certain altitude, though you need to keep them in Airplane mode if they are cellular devices (no attempting connection to cellular is allowed at high altitudes). Most phones allow you to manually turn on WiFi while in Airplane mode to accommodate this.

Re:3Mbps shared

[NatasRevol]

Sounds like my office.

Re:Who needs WiFi?

[Colonel Korn]

How is a Super Nintendo emulator in any way comparable to WiFi when they're looking for a way to stay connected to the internet while they're traveling? I'm glad you can so easily be amused by your foresight to entertain yourself in such a lightweight manner, but for some people there's business to do, people to contact, emails to write, travel arrangements to make, and countless other tasks that someone would want and need internet for.

Hit up up down down left right left right b a select start and you get full broadband access from any SNES emulator.

interesting setup

[datapharmer]

The setup of these systems is actually rather interesting from a FOSS perspective. They appear to run a redhat derivative and squid and use some interesting tricks to control access to the network. I figure the squid is probably caching locally on the plane to lower the bandwidth consumption, but haven't really invetigated too far. The network routing is more interesting: If you hard code the DNS they will tamper with the route and either null route you or redirect to their sign-up page. But there are some exceptions, such as google for example: if you force https you can access google and related results just fine, but attempting to access gmail (even via mail.google.com) will result in a timeout even over https. You can also access a few sites for free such as amazon. Since you can hard-code the related IP addresses for google or amazon, it has been theorized that you could setup a proxy via google's servers or amazon's servers and get out that way by directing all lookups to that IP address from your hosts file or equivalent. When authenticating directly they appear to use ARP records to determine who is restricted and who isn't, so arp or mac spoofing would probably allow a non-paying customer to use a paying customer's credentials (albeit at the expense of probably making both connections pretty intolerable). The routing is most likely handled within the plane after a global sign-in is performed, but I haven't confirmed this.

First World Problems

[Phasma Felis]

"My access to global information networks from a pocket-sized computer while flying miles above the earth is so slow that I can only watch pornography in standard definition!"

Leased Tower Space

[Princeofcups]

"a network of 250 dedicated cell towers that it has built nationwide"

I worked on this project for a time, and this might be a minor point, but they do not have dedicated cell towers. Most of their antennas are on towers that are owned by third parties. It's much easier to lease space on someone else's tower than to have to deal with the politics and cost of erecting your own.