I help manage a website based on Magento and whenever I want to hear the sound of crickets, I post a technical question to its user forum. If it hasn't already been asked and answered, you're pretty much screwed.
When I was younger and electricity was still being installed in homes, it was necessary to run wire in existing walls. This was a challenge because the lath and mortar walls had little room to get the wire through them (dry wall had not yet been invented). We figured out how to wire the homes using drop chains and fish tape to get the wires to where they needed to be. I drilled a lot of holes by hand. Now that people are faced with running CAT5E through walls, they are stymied and instead are trying to figure out ways around it by superimposing high frequency networking signals on to existing copper (like phone or power wire). Even worse, they decide to pollute the RF spectrum by using wireless networking to interface fixed equipment. Wireless networking should be used for mobile, battery-powered equipment, and nothing else. But I digress...
I experimented with HPNA in the 2.0 era (around 2001) and found that it over delivered as far as throughput. Its throughput buried the equivalent Wifi and it was rock solid even during simultaneous use of the copper with analog phone calls and DSL connections. But then the HPNA manufacturers abandoned the market. I don't have faith that anyone credible will come in to implement the HPNA 3.0 spec.
I've since given up on the mis-application of copper media and have instead gotten out my drill, drop chain, and fish tape and recommend you do the same. Gbit over CAT5E is cheap and reliable and will be around for many years whereas the non-standard interfaces will fall by the wayside.
The cost per passenger mile of the best air transports run about 80 miles/gallon/passenger. So, the cost in fuel to get a passenger across the US or the Atlantic is around 40 gallons. This is around $US60/passenger in fuel. Have you had any tickets in that price range lately?
Fuel is a big part of the cost of running an airline, but it's obviously not the biggest cost.
Reading through the press release details, it appears that the testing done to date has been air to ground with an 1150 mile maximum range. The satellite portion was something to be done in the future. I have my reservations about the viability of two-way broadband satellite communication from an aircraft.
The 'enabling technology' is a solid-state phased array antenna. This might be compact enough to mount on the belly of an aircraft and use the phasing to control the antenna azimuth because it's basically a 2-dimensional problem. However, with satellites, you have to control both azimuth and elevation and that doesn't have an easy solution by phasing the antenna elements. Once you turn it into a 3-D problem, the antenna has to have a wide open view above the airframe which means you will have to replace some of the aluminum aircraft skin with radome material. You can imagine the re-certification issues that would cause.
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I help manage a website based on Magento and whenever I want to hear the sound of crickets, I post a technical question to its user forum. If it hasn't already been asked and answered, you're pretty much screwed.
When I was younger and electricity was still being installed in homes, it was necessary to run wire in existing walls. This was a challenge because the lath and mortar walls had little room to get the wire through them (dry wall had not yet been invented). We figured out how to wire the homes using drop chains and fish tape to get the wires to where they needed to be. I drilled a lot of holes by hand. Now that people are faced with running CAT5E through walls, they are stymied and instead are trying to figure out ways around it by superimposing high frequency networking signals on to existing copper (like phone or power wire). Even worse, they decide to pollute the RF spectrum by using wireless networking to interface fixed equipment. Wireless networking should be used for mobile, battery-powered equipment, and nothing else. But I digress...
I experimented with HPNA in the 2.0 era (around 2001) and found that it over delivered as far as throughput. Its throughput buried the equivalent Wifi and it was rock solid even during simultaneous use of the copper with analog phone calls and DSL connections. But then the HPNA manufacturers abandoned the market. I don't have faith that anyone credible will come in to implement the HPNA 3.0 spec.
I've since given up on the mis-application of copper media and have instead gotten out my drill, drop chain, and fish tape and recommend you do the same. Gbit over CAT5E is cheap and reliable and will be around for many years whereas the non-standard interfaces will fall by the wayside.
-Lee
http://www.k0lee.com/
The cost per passenger mile of the best air transports run about 80 miles/gallon/passenger. So, the cost in fuel to get a passenger across the US or the Atlantic is around 40 gallons. This is around $US60/passenger in fuel. Have you had any tickets in that price range lately?
Fuel is a big part of the cost of running an airline, but it's obviously not the biggest cost.
-Lee
Reading through the press release details, it appears that the testing done to date has been air to ground with an 1150 mile maximum range. The satellite portion was something to be done in the future. I have my reservations about the viability of two-way broadband satellite communication from an aircraft.
The 'enabling technology' is a solid-state phased array antenna. This might be compact enough to mount on the belly of an aircraft and use the phasing to control the antenna azimuth because it's basically a 2-dimensional problem. However, with satellites, you have to control both azimuth and elevation and that doesn't have an easy solution by phasing the antenna elements. Once you turn it into a 3-D problem, the antenna has to have a wide open view above the airframe which means you will have to replace some of the aluminum aircraft skin with radome material. You can imagine the re-certification issues that would cause.