FCC Smooths the Path For Airlines' In-Flight Internet 93
The Washington Post reports on a development that may push Internet access on commercial aircraft from a pleasant luxury (but missing on most U.S. domestic flights) to commonplace. Writes the Post:
"The Federal Communications Commission on Friday approved an application process for airlines to obtain broadband Internet licenses aboard their planes. Previously, airlines were granted permission on an ad hoc basis. Airlines need the FCC’s permission to tap into satellite airwaves while in flight that enable passengers to access the Internet. They also need permission from the Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees the safety of inflight Internet systems." I hope that on-board Internet not only becomes the default, but that free advertising-backed access does, too; especially for short flights, the "24-hour pass" paid access I've seen on United and Delta is tempting, but too pricey.
Pricing (Score:1)
Re:Pricing (Score:5, Insightful)
Too many price-insensitive business travelers willing to pay *any* price with the corporate credit card
I'm a business traveller - Flew 65K miles on 66 segments in 2012. When I've been on flights with IF internet I've never bothered with it. I edit presentations, work on spreadsheets, reply to email ("save draft"), or watch a movie. It's my few hours when I'm *not* connected...
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Hopefully homeland security does not weigh in, some terrorist could communicate with onboard agents of nefarious intent.
Even terrorists need to be entertained, I suppose.
But seriously, though, does it really hurt so much to unplug from the internet for a while (and yes, I am used to long-haul flights, with all-too-common trips between the UK and Australia) and catch up on sleep, listen to music or read a book?
Re:So wireless internet does not crash airlines?? (Score:4, Insightful)
It is nice to have the option of checking the results of a hockey game during a long flight, but in general I agree; having to live without an internet connection for several hours is not a hardship. It is not hard to download a movie or two the day before flying, and anyone who is is critical to their company that the company cannot function if they are out of contact for a few hours needs to be replaced. Critical failure points like that are too dangerous to keep around.
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Obligatory Louis C K: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=aba_1332656862 [liveleak.com]
(skip to 2:00 for the relevant part...)
Oh ${deity}, please, NOT ad-supported internet! (Score:5, Interesting)
Please, for the love of God, Xenu, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, no, not in-flight internet that screws with the stream and inserts its own ads into it, or intercepts random http requests and redirects them to interstitial ads. Taco Bell in South Florida tried that a few months ago, and it broke SO FUCKING MANY Android apps it isn't funny (because the access point's stupid software couldn't tell the difference between a http request for a web page, and a http request made to some web service whose client app is just going to crash and burn if it gets a 302 redirect in a context where the real app would never, ever return one).
Re:Oh ${deity}, please, NOT ad-supported internet! (Score:4, Interesting)
^^^ Oh, I forgot... it also broke non-http-based apps (including ipsec VPNs and SSH), because it would periodically decide to make you watch an ad, and start blocking all traffic from your IP address until you watched one. Except in the meantime, your app is freaking out because it's supposedly connected, but has no apparent connectivity. Oh... and the best part... whatever they were using to serve the ads had a bug that caused the Flash-based ad host to crash when you tried watching ads beyond the first, so once the initial session ran out of time and it decided to make you watch another ad, there was nothing you could do to reconnect and make it work again short of spoofing a different MAC address.
Maybe this is something IETF needs to address, so "free-as-in-no-cash-trading-hands" wifi can at least communicate to OTHER applications that they need to make you watch an ad to avoid having the connection go away. In the meantime, though, I officially regard "free-if-you-watch-the-ads" wifi as a plague that does nothing except cause misery and render the service completely useless.
Re:Oh ${deity}, please, NOT ad-supported internet! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh ${deity}, please, NOT ad-supported internet! (Score:4, Informative)
The videos had forced interactivity (hence, their dependence upon Flash features that Android didn't support). It would stream, then pause and force you to make a choice, like "Which delicious menu item should our hero Jose order?", then made you watch more, then asked a final question you had to get right to prove you watched the video, or it would make you watch it again. (I heard somebody with a laptop at another table angrily complaining about it)
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> HTTPS for everything. Problem solved.
No, that's the point. The way they implemented it caused Android apps to break on multiple levels. If you were tunneled through a PPTP VPN (to encrypt all of your traffic, and prevent a badly-written app that used http from leaking information about you to someone running Wireshark in the vicinity), it broke everything after ~10 minutes when it decided to block you for not watching an ad. Attempting to launch the web browser at that point didn't help, because the we
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Stop moaning about something offered for free... Taco Bell FFS - if it's that important to you, bleeding go somewhere else...
and as for the pizza hut app.... have you ever..... like... thought of using the phone to *talk* ??
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How about supporting it with a tiny fraction of the cost of the flight tickets which we already pay for?
Because many airlines are teetering on the brink of insolvency and that 'tiny fraction' often represents the meager profit margin on a given ticket.
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Dude. It's Taco Bell.
Eat your "food" and get the hell out of there.
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For that matter, unless they can find ways to dramatically increase the bandwidth, I don't want in-flight Internet to become cheap either. Please keep it expensive enough that most people will choose not to use it, so it'll be fast enough for those of us who are trying to get work done. Or maybe introduce tiered pricing so that those who need the higher speeds can get it.
Not satellite access required. (Score:3)
GoGo uses cellular service, not sat links. The whole thing about using your cell phone on an aircraft is utter bullshit and has been since day one.
Heres an map old map of some of their towers.
http://www.gadling.com/2009/12/07/aircell-headquarters-chicago-internet/ [gadling.com]
Analog cell phones worked just fine on aircraft. Digital doesn't have the power to do it at 35k feet, of course, you also have a battery that'll last a couple days instead of just one with digital but thats another argument and that problem can be addresses as well.
Re:Not satellite access required. (Score:5, Informative)
I seem to recall that mobile-phone providers were worried about in-flight use of phones because it could cause a mess with the networks if thousands of customers were hopping cell towers at 500+ mph, instead of at usual walking/subway/biking/driving speeds. One per plane would presumably not cause the same problem.
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Maybe it's the airlines who are worried about the potential for violence inherent in being stuck next to someone jabbering away on their phone for an 8 hour flight? I hope they block Skype...
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You can already do that on a lot of flights, you just have to pay a silly amount per second for the call. I'm amazed the airlines haven't seen the obvious money-making opportunity here - allow bidding between passengers to use or prevent the use of the phone.
Re:Not satellite access required. (Score:4, Informative)
Batteries lasting a couple of days vs one has nothing to do with digital vs analog. I have had a digital (GSM) phone with a battery that lasts for two weeks easily. Batteries these days don't last more than a day because of those gigaherzes of cpu to power, inches of screen to light and constant communications for smartness.
And by the way - GSM goes easily to 35k feet (11km) - if there are no obstrucions - you know - like in the AIR. We use a ferry to travel from Tallinn (Estonia) to Helsinki (Finland) and only right in the middle of this ~80 KM journey is there no cell reception from either shore. I would extrapolate that at least 30 km (3 times the height of commercial air traffic) is easily doable.
Cell phone reception only sucks if you have buildings or plants in the way. Or a mountain.
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Batteries lasting a couple of days vs one has nothing to do with digital vs analog. I have had a digital (GSM) phone with a battery that lasts for two weeks easily. Batteries these days don't last more than a day because of those gigaherzes of cpu to power, inches of screen to light and constant communications for smartness.
And by the way - GSM goes easily to 35k feet (11km) - if there are no obstrucions - you know - like in the AIR. We use a ferry to travel from Tallinn (Estonia) to Helsinki (Finland) and only right in the middle of this ~80 KM journey is there no cell reception from either shore. I would extrapolate that at least 30 km (3 times the height of commercial air traffic) is easily doable.
Cell phone reception only sucks if you have buildings or plants in the way. Or a mountain.
What BitZtream meant (I think) is that a clunky old analog handset (Motorola Microtec, Startec, Nokia 918) would only get like 1 day standby time, while a digital (GSM, TDMA, CDMA) dumb phone can get like a week. That is an analog vs digital issue.
As far as smart phones, my Android phone will get like 3 days standby if data and wifi are turned off and it's used purely as a dumb phone, and a day if data or wifi is running.
A lot of digital mobile technology has a maximum range of about 35km. This is due to la
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Well, it sort of did. Analog cell phones had much higher transmit power, so they typically ran down batteries much faster. To provide the same talk time, they used bigger batteries. S
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And by the way - GSM goes easily to 35k feet (11km) - if there are no obstrucions - you know - like in the AIR. We use a ferry to travel from Tallinn (Estonia) to Helsinki (Finland) and only right in the middle of this ~80 KM journey is there no cell reception from either shore. I would extrapolate that at least 30 km (3 times the height of commercial air traffic) is easily doable.
Cell phone reception only sucks if you have buildings or plants in the way. Or a mountain.
Just because you have good reception straight out from the tower at 30km doesn't mean you'll have good service 11km in the air. The cell phone towers are tuned to have good horizontal coverage, not vertically. It's not a perfect sphere of coverage; these are directional arrays that are designed to provide coverage where most of their customers are...on the ground. The first link [blogspot.com] that came up in my Google search seems to have some more information about coverage patterns.
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BS. It hasn't been 'expensive' for a few years. See my previous post. Its no more expensive to do it on an airplane than it is to do it on a cell phone. In fact, ITS EXACTLY THE SAME THING.
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WiFi on Southwest is only $5 per day right now, which is less than gogo charges for WiFi in the airport!
And in my experience, it's HORRIBLY slow. Last time I went to Texas, I noticed the return AUS->BNA flight had it and figured "why not?" Web pages took forever to load and would frequently time out, the onboard hosted content wasn't exactly snappy, and even AIM and IRC had trouble keeping a connection.
Re:Good luck w/ regards to pricing (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it is slow. When I have used it, it gave me slightly better than dial-up speeds and, on occasion, I would lose connectivity for a few minutes. Basically, good enough for email and light surfing. I also downloaded a few PDFs.
On the other hand, I am sitting 7 miles in the air, moving at several hundred miles an hour and able to access the Internet! Sure, it isn't a great connection, but I'm 7 miles in the air - so I think it's pretty sweet.
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Aircraft will be using something like HughesNet [hughesnet.com]. They might have to throttle the onboard WiFi speeds to keep everyone from streaming video simultaneously. But for web surfing, e-mail, some gaming (latency might be an issue), etc. it will be just fine. And for reasonable* prices.
* Nothing like millions of dollars per plane per year.
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Assuming, of course, that they don't get FAP'ed within 12 minutes of takeoff, and end up with an entire plane sharing the equivalent of dialup 9600 baud.
I'd be happy just to have an AC outlet... (Score:4, Insightful)
As much as I generally am rather fond of the EmbraerJets, I am rather annoyed that they never give me anywhere to plug in my laptop, it would well offset my frustration over the inability to stand up in the aisle.
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I'm mac, and I use this: http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB441Z/A/apple-magsafe-airline-adapter [apple.com]
Perhaps you should see what you need for your laptop. I've not had a power issues in a couple of years thanks to having the right adapter.
Expecting to plug in to AC is rather retarded on an aircraft as it would require large inverters to power a full aircraft, and then all the inverters are going to do is power your converter thats going to bounce it back down to essentially the same voltage as it started out a
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While that is useful if the plane has any sort of seat power, most of the RJs (regional jets) don't have anything. And given the poor economic performance of most airlines and the typically limited competition (at least at the regional level) upgrading the seats isn't going to happen quickly, you're more likely to solve your computing problem by getting a laptop with a better battery.
And, of course, there is always the iPad and similar ilk.
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Re:I'd be happy just to have an AC outlet... (Score:5, Funny)
Few if any domestic flights have power (DC or AC), in cattle class anyways.
So bring a 100 foot extension cord and reel it out up to first class.
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Virgin America flies to 22 airports, in 18 metro areas, or 15 US metro areas.
So, if you're traveling non-stop on one coast, or with one stop in Chicago between coasts, and you happen to be traveling between two of these fifteen locations, then Virgin is definitely an option.
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Re:I'd be happy just to have an AC outlet... (Score:4, Interesting)
Virgin is arguably the best airline that currently operates in the US. If they had flights to Vancouver they would be my default airline.
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Perhaps you should see what you need for your laptop. I've not had a power issues in a couple of years thanks to having the right adapter.
Regional Jets don't have that kind of plug, either. Hell some of them don't even have room for full-size carry-on bags, you have to gate check just about anything larger than a briefcase. Any kind of electricity would be a convenience that the airlines don't care to provide.
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The last planes I was on for the 3.5 to 4 hour flight between MSP and SAN, were a 757 and a MD90. Neither have any sort of power anywhere on the plane. A 4 hour flight on a workstation laptop running autocad/inventor is just never going to work. Nor is it going to work for a movie.
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Actually, the plane sockets provide very little power - usually under 55W or so. For a small laptop, not a big deal, but a larger ones will often require entering special modes that disable battery charging (I believe the Apple one te
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Expecting to plug in to AC is rather retarded on an aircraft[...]
"Retarded" though it may be, Virgin Atlantic has them, as do many (most?) international flights.
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Actually power on aircraft is generated as AC, either from the engines or a dedicated fuel-burning unit. Often it is at a different frequency to normal mains, but is converted to say 230V/50Hz or 110V/60Hz to run small appliances like microwaves and coffee makers, as well as provide power for 1st class passengers and the in-flight entertainment system.
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Why don't you get a better computer like a Mac. It has good battery life. 8 hours.
Not when it is running Photoshop, Illustrator, Powerpoint, Excel, and Word simultaneously it doesn't. Some of us need to do actual work with our laptops, and will get less than the optimal battery life expectancy from them as a result - even with 8gb ram. I pretty well always have at least 3 of those 5 running at any given time, and often all 5; it's what I need to do in order to put a presentation together.
It's called work, try it sometime and you might come to know what I'm talking about.
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Not when it is running Photoshop, Illustrator, Powerpoint, Excel, and Word simultaneously it doesn't.
Here's a crazy thought.... Close some applications!
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Not when it is running Photoshop, Illustrator, Powerpoint, Excel, and Word simultaneously it doesn't.
Here's a crazy thought.... Close some applications!
Have you considered the crazy possibility that I might have them open all at the same time because I need them open at the same time? If I close any one of them then I'm not working on my presentation, which is my most frequent task when I am packed into steerage class on the flying sardine cans. Being as most of my travel is for work - meaning I am likely going somewhere to do a presentation - the flight is a great place to finish putting said presentation together.
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Being as most of my travel is for work - meaning I am likely going somewhere to do a presentation - the flight is a great place to finish putting said presentation together.
As I posted earlier, I'm *Gold, flew 66 segments last year, many of them flights to presentations. I've given hundreds of them and I've never been in a situation where I needed all those apps open at the same time. Time for a compromise somewhere.
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Being as most of my travel is for work - meaning I am likely going somewhere to do a presentation - the flight is a great place to finish putting said presentation together.
As I posted earlier, I'm *Gold, flew 66 segments last year, many of them flights to presentations. I've given hundreds of them and I've never been in a situation where I needed all those apps open at the same time
Well, then, your presentations likely don't involve the types of data that mine do.
Time for a compromise somewhere.
So you suggest I should quit my job and change to a different career path? These applications are key to my life's work. I use all of them, or I have no job.
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So you suggest I should quit my job and change to a different career path?
No, I mean compromise by flying an airline with inflight power or compromise by doing the presentations before you fly (like I did in the good ol' days) or compromise by opening and closing apps as you need them or compromise by buying a power pad battery or compromise by leaving early so you can work on them in your hotel room when you arrive or...
...compromise.
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No, I mean compromise by flying an airline with inflight power
Not available in my market at any price. My market is served pretty well exclusively by regional jets and older 737s.
or compromise by doing the presentations before you fly (like I did in the good ol' days)
Not possible when I am flying at most one day after that last day of data collection.
or compromise by opening and closing apps as you need them
Opening and closing photoshop and illustrator every five minutes is penny-wise and pound-foolish, at best.
or compromise by buying a power pad battery
Good luck getting that through airport security...
or compromise by leaving early so you can work on them in your hotel room when you arrive
For some odd reason the airlines don't ask for my input when they set their time tables. Rarely do I have more than one outgoing flight a day going
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Good luck getting that through airport security...
Man, you're an obstinate fellow. I carry mine through security all the time, with no problems.
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Care to show me a portable Mac with a workstation GPU? (FireGL or Quatro)
Okay, even if you could get one of those, what do you think they would do to the battery life? Workstation cards tend to have only minimal power saving modes.
Why apply? (Score:2)
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The issue is not that it is or isn't safe to use WiFi inflight, the reason for FCC approval is for 2 things:
1.Device approval for all the devices that pick up WiFi signals and translate them into either a satellite up-link or a down-link to a ground station. (this may be done once for a given device or it may have to be done differently for each individual aircraft model based on the exact setup of different components it uses)
and 2.Approval to transmit on the frequencies used for these links to the outside
Welcome to the 21st century (Score:1)
The FAA, they always seem to be on that leading edge of change.
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You misspelled FCC.
Ad sponsored content is free riding (Score:2)
Project Divert Attension from TSA: Success!! (Score:2)
Having to pay is actually a good thing. (Score:2)
Think of it now. We all know how much WiFi sucks when it's overused. That's what advertising-supported on-board Internet will be like. It will be slow (the bandwidth to the ground is single-digit megabits per second, so divide that by 50 to 300 passengers - and some passengers will have multiple devices).
On the other hand, charge a a few bucks for it and only the people who really want it will pay for it. Yes, some will be business users, but I already think the pay-per-day prices aren't all that bad.
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The increased radiation from being at 35k feet is far far worse than wifi, or even an X-ray or two.
Air pirates welcome (Score:1)
As the CIA has already nicely cleared the issue for travelers, if something is done at an aircraft, is is not really a concern of any jurisdiction. Please enjoy the total freedom of an airborne wifi network, semi-responsively.