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