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How Inflight Wifi Works

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Re: How Inflight Wifi Works

#121

Post by mikeash »

dheera wrote: post #119
mikeash wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say anything about biggest. I'll note that they typically charge an order of magnitude or two more for the airplane than for the WiFi, so I don't see anything contradictory there. Why should WiFi be free like water regardless of where you are? WiFi in a coffee shop, sure. It costs about $100 to set it up and maybe $50/month to run it for the whole place. WiFi on an airplane? That's neither easy nor cheap to…

For the same reason drinking water is free on airplanes. For the same reason it's free to use bathrooms on planes. These are considered basic human necessities. I see internet access becoming a basic human necessity. Sooner or later our devices will "expect" to be connected 24 hours a day, and the applications running on them will make the assumption that internet access is available at all times with smooth handover…

Well, when this utopia you imagine comes to fruition, then you can complain about how airplane WiFi ought to be free. I bet it'll be a lot cheaper to provide by then. But for now, let's focus on how things currently are, and how they are is pretty much nobody needs internet access while on a plane, and those who do should be able to afford the $10.

Re: How Inflight Wifi Works

#122

Post by dheera »

mikeash wrote: post #121
dheera wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason drinking water is free on airplanes. For the same reason it's free to use bathrooms on planes. These are considered basic human necessities. I see internet access becoming a basic human necessity. Sooner or later our devices will "expect" to be connected 24 hours a day, and the applications running on them will make the assumption that internet access is available at all times with smooth handover…

Well, when this utopia you imagine comes to fruition, then you can complain about how airplane WiFi ought to be free. I bet it'll be a lot cheaper to provide by then. But for now, let's focus on how things currently are, and how they are is pretty much nobody needs internet access while on a plane, and those who do should be able to afford the $10.

It should be reasonably cheap to provide, even now. Hike all airfares by $0.25, and provide it free. Throttle the bandwidth for people who abuse what the connection is capable of. From a software innovation standpoint this would be a much better situation. In-flight social networks, in-flight CDNs and mesh networks that efficiently deliver mass amounts of video content over limited bandwidth, virtual reality experiences between passengers to kill the time, augmented reality telling you what's interesting on the ground where you're flying, the possibilities are endless, if only we could assume everyone was connected.

Re: How Inflight Wifi Works

#123

Post by calebm »

0xdragon wrote: post #112
finnn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got 10-15 second round trip time to the ground using DNS tunneling on Southwest's inflight WiFi

Anyone tried ICMP tunnelling? :)

They were blocking ICMP on United last time I checked (4 days ago). If I pinged a website, the ip would come back, but the pings would timeout.

Re: How Inflight Wifi Works

#124

Post by mikeash »

dheera wrote: post #122
mikeash wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, when this utopia you imagine comes to fruition, then you can complain about how airplane WiFi ought to be free. I bet it'll be a lot cheaper to provide by then. But for now, let's focus on how things currently are, and how they are is pretty much nobody needs internet access while on a plane, and those who do should be able to afford the $10.

It should be reasonably cheap to provide, even now. Hike all airfares by $0.25, and provide it free. Throttle the bandwidth for people who abuse what the connection is capable of. From a software innovation standpoint this would be a much better situation. In-flight social networks, in-flight CDNs and mesh networks that efficiently deliver mass amounts of video content over limited bandwidth, virtual reality experien…

I must say, none of what you describe sounds even remotely interesting. It's like one of those articles from the early 90s prognosticating on all the cool stuff the internet would enable, and getting it all terribly wrong. Virtual reality experiences between passengers? Pass.

In-flight internet gets used for exactly the same stuff as internet anywhere else. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but that's what you're going to enable, not these weird new things.

Re: How Inflight Wifi Works

#125

Post by ubernostrum »

rconti wrote: post #114
ubernostrum wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven't even bothered to try. Sure they have. All three of the big legacy US airlines have some form of extra-legroom economy: American has Main Cabin Extra, Delta has Comfort+ and United has Economy Plus. The problem is those seats cost more, and people shop for airfares based solely on the price they see in a search engine. Airlines have tried all sorts of tricks to get people to buy the nicer seat. They've tr…

I specifically mentioned that I was looking for a human-sized seat, not more legroom. I'm not unusually tall, I'm an average-sized male adult, and I'd like to have somewhere to put my arm. I don't really enjoy having my elbows pinned to my sides for 4 or 6 or 14 hours.

Wider seats take up more space, which means fewer seats which means less revenue. And there's no way they'll give that up; they're facing competition both domestically and internationally now from sardine-can aircraft layouts on low-cost carriers.

So these days, US-based airlines have standardized on a width of 17-18 inches in economy class. Used to be long-haul international flights would have slightly wider seats, but now they're aiming to get 10-across seating in economy and you can't do that with 18-inch-wide seats.

If you want a wider seat, your options are to pay for first class or (if traveling internationally) pay for premium economy on a foreign carrier.

Re: How Inflight Wifi Works

#126

Post by 0xdragon »

calebm wrote: post #123
0xdragon wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone tried ICMP tunnelling? :)

They were blocking ICMP on United last time I checked (4 days ago). If I pinged a website, the ip would come back, but the pings would timeout.

Ah, that's a pity. I might try it when I fly next. Wish there was a website that displayed the airline along with which different tunnelling methods worked. I'd pay for that :)

Re: How Inflight Wifi Works

#128

Post by prostoalex »

devy wrote: post #7

This paragraph is absurd. Not sure if the author was excessively exaggerating or this is true. Can someone who's a domain expert or is familiar with the device to clarify why in-flight WAPs are 10x more expensive but 10x more fragile? Cosmic rays? Called Wireless Access Points (or WAPs), these black boxes function similarly to Wi-Fi routers that would be found in a home, but because they’re on an airplane, they cost…

http://garmin.blogs.com/my_weblog/2015/06/the-price-tag-asso...

Re: How Inflight Wifi Works

#129

Post by thescriptkiddie »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #86
thescriptkiddie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I flew internationally, I brought a 2015 macbook pro retina with a hard drive full of videos. I only ended up getting 4 of the advertised 9 hours run time running VLC with the brightness turned all the way down. Luckily, there were power outlets hidden under the seats. I don't understand why power outlets aren't the number 1 selling point for airlines that have them.

I brought a 2015 macbook pro retina with a hard drive full of videos Not clear which exact model you have. Some have a discrete AMD GPU which would take more power. Also it's not clear what format your videos were in. If it's something like DVD rips, then it could have been MPEG-2. I don't think Intel GPUs have any hardware support for playing that back. Also VLC probably doesn't take advantage of any CPU support for…

It's the low-end 15" model with Intel Iris 6100 integrated graphics, and the files were mostly H.264. I suppose I could have played them in iTunes, but I made a conscious decision to never run it.
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