Posting from a plane! (Well, on the ground)

[major_clanger]

Updating from a laptop. Via a wireless LAN. On board a Boeing 737. Sitting on the runway at Farnborough. Connected via satellite.

Neat, huh?

Comments

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

Pretty neat. Possibly not a valid use of your time there, though?

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

Aw, give a Clanger a break, he's all on his own at the air show not having managed to drag me along (I've taken a day's leave to do Unicon admin) and probably bursting with excitement at all the neat planes but with no one to enthuse at. :-(

Bug

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

I was thinking he was in one of those "They're trying to teach me stuff and I really ought to be listening and ... ooh! Internet!" situations.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Everyone raise a hand, who only ever uses the Internet for non-work stuff during non-work time... (Tigrons have paws, not hands :-)

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I was there to keep myself up to date on developments in the aerospace industry (especially ones relevant to a comms engineer like me) so having a look at a live demo of broadband on an aircraft was probably one of the more valid uses of my time there today!

A bit more context: Boeing have fitted out a 737 as a testbed and demonstrator for their 'Connexion' (sic) Airborne Broadband system. They've brought it to Farnborough 2002 and were running it in the display park. I asked one of the staff some technical questions; he went and found me their satcom expert, who then gave me a quick guided tour and pointed me at some of the demo kit to have a play. As well as network ports on each seat the plane had onboard wireless LAN, fed from a 5MB downlink via a roof-mounted antenna patch. I picked up one of the notebook PCs lying around (you can tell this was a trade day, not a public one!) and I was able to get streaming video from BBC News 24 with a sustained data rate of 60K plus, so I was reasonably impressed.

I didn't have too long to play with this - there were lots of other visitors being given demos - but I couldn't resist the opportunity for a quick post to LiveJournal.

MC

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Have you started working for Polkta?

BTW I've just heard that our collaborators have installed WiFi in their
meeting room, so I'm just going to have to get an airport card for my TiBook.