Jeff Goldman on our sister blog The Wireless Weblog let's us know that JetBlue will be testing WiFi on an LAX-to-SFO flight on the 11th of December (Tuesday). Several other US airlines have announced plans to go down this road as well.
JetBlue's experiment will severely restrict your Internet access to Blackberry email and email and IM through Yahoo. You must have a wifi-enabled Blackberry as the service will not support traditional mobile phone networks.
It's a baby step. I understand there are bandwidth limitations, and Blackberry support is a good choice. But why Yahoo? Why not Google or any other number of service providers? Hopefully they won't charge for this severely restricted service and eventually open it up.
December 9th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
But how to be with radio interferences?
December 9th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
Linor,
There shouldn’t be any radio interference with this wifi setup. This technology operates independently from the plane’s communication and control systems frequencies.
It’s even safe to actually use a regular cellphone on a plane while in flight. It does not interfere with anything. The reason why you aren’t allowed to use them aboard while flying is because the flight attendants need the complete attention of their passengers. It’s not a tech issue, just a control one.
December 9th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
The other issue you have with mobile phones in particular is that the phone can connect with thousands of towers at once due to altitude. I can’t imagine that would go over well with the mobile phone carriers.
December 10th, 2007 at 2:35 am
I would say that this experiment will help a lot in restricting the users of mobile web.
December 10th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Good point Dameon.