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.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2002-07-26 12:57 pm (UTC)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