Live data from Hacker News

WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

jamesbvaughan.com

101–110 of 675 posts

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#101

I was just thinking that you could take a picture from the window and then tie the GPS coordinates to the image with the output from that JSON. Kind of handy.

If you have location permissions enabled in your camera app, the image's exif data will have the coordinates in it.

(US Civilian GPS units are prohibited from working above 60,000 ft above sea level and 1,000 knots due to ITAR munitions export restrictions.)

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#103

The speed unit looks more like knots than mph.

I'm not so sure. The same data packet claims that the flight has 2h 25m of flight time left to cover 1167 miles. That works out to 483 mph, which is pretty close to the stated 487 and might be explained by some padding added to the time to account for taxiing.

Unless that 1167 figure is in a different unit it doesn't even come close to working out at 487 knots ground speed.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#104
post #80

It is just 8 bucks for the full service... just buy the internet bro. It is actually pretty good.

Sure. But you’re on a site called “Hacker News”. I’m not sure that there’s a more perfect topic of discussion for a site with that name.

[flagged]

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#105

If you travel lite with clothes in a book bag(wash clothes if extended stay)… I don't see why anyone would fly United, Southwest, American Airlines, etc VS.the budget Airlines like Spirit. Maybe if you have points with those airlines… Otherwise, save hundreds of dollars using budget airlines which the planes are newer in my experience, and never had a bad experience versus my recent bad experiences with Delta and the…

> I don't see why anyone would fly United, Southwest, American Airlines, etc VS.the budget Airlines like Spirit.

I'm on a spoke (not a hub) and just don't have the service available to use budget airlines even if I wanted to. We have JetBlue -- they fly to Boston and that's it. We have Allegiant and they fly to Phoenix (not really Phoenix -- Mesa), and we have Avelo they they fly to LA (not really LA: Burbank). All these airlines fly one flight per day, and often not every day of the week. When I'm traveling somewhere that works for the budget airlines, I'm still leery because if their plane breaks down or there is "weather in Cincinnati", I'm screwed. They don't have a second plane available.

otoh we have United, Delta, American, Alaska, Southwest with flights to several hubs each, multiple flights per day, through international ticketing, first class sometimes open... Plus I don't pay for luggage on the major carriers due to credit card membership/status.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#107
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the situation where net neutrality falls over because there's very often more demand, even at 1.5Mbps for a stream, than an airplane's link can provide.

Airlines, coffee shops and similar entities providing Internet as an ancillary service were not subject to these rules when they were in effect. The rules primarily target ISPs selling directly to customers.

It also fails for mobile data and large crowds. Try checking your email at a concert.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#108
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On iOS all notifications have to use Apple's Push service. And the WiFi essentially has to allow the Apple push notification system entirely in order for iMessage to work fully the way people expect. So it's really a side effect. But yeah for example with the free iMessage connection on Southwest, I can see all the notifications come in on Discord, but of course I cannot connect within the discord app to actually loa…

>On iOS all notifications have to use Apple's Push service. Have to? Isn't there an option to send 'offline' notification? I mean, coming from the app itself, rather then external callback? With that, app could ommit the official way of using Apple Push service, no?

Well, apps can only "run in the background" for up to 10 minutes.

So sure, an app can generate a notification popup itself, but it's pretty limited as it won't be able to generate a notification after being backgrounded for more than 10 minutes.

And the 10 minutes is also only if the app is designed to extend the duration as long as possible. Normally it would get cut off after 1 minute.

So because of this it seems that in the vast, vast majority of cases apps choose to send their notifications from the Apple Push notification service.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#109
On many United flights you can connect to onboard wifi without buying the plan and have internet access on port 22 and apparently unrestricted UDP. This allows me to connect to an EC2 instance running mosh. Coding in vim is a great way to pass the time on a flight.

Re: WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

#110
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On iOS all notifications have to use Apple's Push service. And the WiFi essentially has to allow the Apple push notification system entirely in order for iMessage to work fully the way people expect. So it's really a side effect. But yeah for example with the free iMessage connection on Southwest, I can see all the notifications come in on Discord, but of course I cannot connect within the discord app to actually loa…

>On iOS all notifications have to use Apple's Push service. Have to? Isn't there an option to send 'offline' notification? I mean, coming from the app itself, rather then external callback? With that, app could ommit the official way of using Apple Push service, no?

Yea but those mean the app has to be running. The main advantage of Apple's Push is that the app can be put to sleep and only wake up when you tap a notification.
Post reply on HN