Forget that in-flight cellphone ban: WiFi + VoIP means you can still annoy your fellow passengers
posted December 17th 2004 4:21AM
You know, even if the Federales never ease up a little and start letting people use their cellphones midair, there's still a very good chance that sooner or later you'll have to listen to some foolio seated next to you yapping away for the entire flight. Why? WiFi. You might not be able to whip out your Nokia anytime soon, but you can already get in-flight wireless Internet access right here and now, and since all you'll need is a laptop and fast enough connection, you'll be able to make free/cheap Voice over IP calls for as long as you'd like. And even if they do allow you to use your cellie to make calls, the roaming charges will probably be so crazy that a lot of people (especially business travelers) will want to use VoIP anyway. Oren Michels over at on GigaOm thinks it'll be a big boost for Skype, but really, any softphone based VoIP service will do just nicely.
Hark back to the days when we could still smoke on planes, and there was a smoking section, and a non-smoking section. Here in London today, on the commuter trains, there are "normal" carriages, and then "quiet" carriages where passengers are requested not to have phone conversations, play video games or otherwise cause a fuss.
I can't imagine it will be too terribly long in the future before we will see the same sort of thing on planes - Talking and Non-Talking sections. Speaking personally, on long-haul flights I would pay a premium not to suffer through someone wittering away beside me - especially if he's on the phone.
The FCC has a differente opinion than the FAA on cellphone banning. Now they are thinking of lifting the ban, provided that cellphones are used at minimum power and that an on-board receiver collects all outgoing calls and routes them through a single transmission back to... earth. See http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-255246A1.doc
Don't forget that Mac users can use Apple iChat to conduct audio- and video-chats over IP for free. If the bandwidth is there, this is an option many people will use.
It's interesting to note that, though AOL IM offers these services for free in it's WinXP version, nobody ever offers them as a way to talk over IP for free; it's always Skype. I'm sure that says something about the usability of AOL IM on WinXP vs that of iChat on Mac OS X, but this is neither the time nor the place.
I haven't heard anything about the delay and jitter times that can be experienced from a plane. I expect them to be substantial, effectively making VoIP from a plane impossible, since it has strict demands in this respect.
This would be a good laugh for a headache. Picture, if you will, a person trying to describe to a flight attendant the difference between a cell phone and WiFi/VoIP and why you not really making a "cell phone call" _per se_. You'll probably have to find another geek way to disturb your fellow passengers.
Nice theory, doesn't work in practice. I tried on Lufthansa's Munich-L.A. run with Skype. The uplink speed is just too low to support the connection other than in a very garbled way. You can hear the other side just fine, though.
Rats, VOIP is going to render my portable cell-phone jammer (that looks exactly like a cell phone) ineffective in airplanes.
Tried SkypeOut on the Scandinavian Airlines flight from Copenhagen to Seattle. Worked ok, the quality was great but there was one heck of a delay that made any normal conversation pretty much impossible. Still, it beats the 9 dollar a minute satphone charge.
Reminds me of that time that some Apple developers had an iChat AV videochat at 35,000 feet:
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/articles/2004/06/ichat_at_35k/