Addicted
by Volker Weber
Comments
[jealous]Still not operating on ORD-MUC route[/jealous]
How much does it cost? More than the flight itself? ;-)
That was cool - just talked to Mitch on Skype while they are somewhere west of Greenland. Some latency, and some clipping, but on balance, very usable. Makes a great demo...
That actually does sound like a reasonable price for people who can use the time on flight to do some work and need network connectivity to do so.
Does anyone know of a website with a list of flights on which this is already available?
The overall list is on the Connexion by Boeing site.
For Lufthansa, it is listed at Flynet.
SAS Scandinavian has plans to operate the service starting next month.
The US government has not yet cleared operation of this service on any US-flag carriers.
Lufthansa uses the Connexion by Boeing service, see http://www.connexionbyboeing.com for more details.
Basically, it is a normal WLAN broadband network, but of course you share the bandwidth, so a planeload of IBMers sort of slowed things down during the first few hours. It got faster as they fell asleep and their Thinkpad batteries died.
The latency was high, however. I use www.t-online.de as my ping measurement standard against the Deutsche Telekom backbone. I get under 20ms at home with T-DSL with fastpath. T-DSL interleaved is about 70-80ms. I had 800ms on the plane! The speed of light accounts for most of this, i.e. the distance to the satellite for the double hop is about 40,000km x 4 = 160,000km, or about 530ms.
It costs $29.95 flat rate for the entire 11+ hour flight. Saturday they had it reduced to $14.95, supposedly because they were doing maintanence and the performance would not be as good.
I only lost the network once that I noticed during the entire flight for a few seconds between Iceland and Greenland. I had a VPN connection up for over seven hours at one point.
For those that may ask: Business has electricity sockets in all chairs. Although I was flying coach, I know which seats have power in coach for the cleaning crew, so I managed to have power the whole trip.
Mitch (or Ed or any other road warrior):
Is there some site that will tell you which seats in coach have the highest chance of having power, by carrier?
Gregg
Actually, there is a good one: http://seatguru.com/
However, they don't have the Lufthansa ones on the 340's that I know about!
Mitch
