WiFi on airlines
The Freakonomics weblog points to a Wall Street Journal article reporting that U.S. airlines will start offering WiFi service within 12 months. I can’t wait. I already often pay the $8 or so to go online during the 30-45 minutes before boarding, and I’d love to be able to read email and get work done while I’m flying.
One interesting thing from the article: The company providing the service, AirCell, plans to block Skype and other VoIP services. This is one of the first examples I’ve seen of a company being very up-front about ignoring network neutrality. I can’t think of a technical reason to disallow VoIP. Cell phone calls won’t be allowed on flights quite yet, but the concerns there are different — VoIP doesn’t involve cell radio transmissions.
Erik J. Barzeski Said,
April 4, 2007 @ 6:50 am
It strikes me that this may be more about preserving bandwidth for other customers rather than disallowing services or a certain kind of broadcast. Not to mention that all that talking could possibly annoy other customers.
Stuart Morgan Said,
April 4, 2007 @ 7:24 am
Alternately (assuming that this is a different company), there may well be exclusivity clauses in the contract with whoever provides the back-of-the-seat phone service which prevents the WiFi provider from stepping on their toes.
Scott Kovatch Said,
April 4, 2007 @ 7:28 am
I thik Erik is right. One of the big objections to cell phones on planes isn’t so much the possibility of interference, but rather that people will be yammering all the time, and given the noise in the cabin of most airplanes, you’ll have to practically yell to be heard, anyway. It’s nice to have a few hours of FAA-enforced silence when traveling.
Daniel J. Luke Said,
April 4, 2007 @ 7:41 am
If there is a technical reason, it’s related to the characteristics of VOIP.
In other words, since VOIP doesn’t require lots of bandwidth, it’s not that. VOIP doesn’t work well with lots of latency (but even if it’s a high latency link, they probably wouldn’t actively block VOIP as people would just not use it since it wouldn’t be all that useful). VOIP does, however, end up sending lots of tiny packets. Perhaps the equipment isn’t well suited for high pps rates?
Rosyna Said,
April 4, 2007 @ 9:31 am
I had free wifi on a plane from SFO to Narita, Tokyo (everyone on the plane did). I was in economy class. It was quite the awesome. But I did not trust the connection. With so many people in such a small space, any one of them could have been capturing packets. Unless the Apple people, I have NO idea how to set up a vpn for all traffic to be redirected securely to my house.
Also, the latency sucked. So if Skype sends a lot of small packets, it may be unusable anyways. Then again, people really, really don’t want others talking on the phone in a loud voice over the network when in such cramped quarters.
The people in business class and first class had wired RJ-45 lovin.
Rosyna Said,
April 4, 2007 @ 9:35 am
But, yeah.. it was totally awesome being able to read fark at ten thousand feet.