[ih] Internet in the Air: Was Re: Internet at Sea

[Gergely Buday]

What is the reason for not having general Internet access on planes? A
technical or a security reason?

- Gergely

A sexta, 3/10/2025, 21:01, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> escreveu:

> Implementation of RFC 1149 preceded Connexion by Boeing by about 5 years.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
>
> I still have my first receipt from Connexion by Boeing - $9.95 for one
> hour, on 28 May, 2006.
>
> Regards/Ngā mihi
>     Brian Carpenter
>
> On 04-Oct-25 07:01, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote:
> > Thinking of Internet at Sea, there is also "Internet in the Air" (there
> > is also "Internet in automobiles", which has some similar issues.)
> >
> > Several years back we did some work with the FAA and Boeing who were
> > trying to figure out how to improve air traffic control over the
> > mid-Pacific.  At that time there was not solid voice connectivity to
> > aircraft way out in the middle of the Pacific. (There were some lower
> > frequency radios that could do the job, much of the time, but they were
> > not particularly favored.)
> >
> > We put modified Cisco routers and other gear onto some commercial
> > trans-Pacific aircraft and played.  Because pilots are used to
> > push-to-talk systems and long response times, we could cache voice
> > spurts and interleave those with other traffic.  That gave us a lot of
> > flexibility about adding things like redundancy in case of RF noise.
> >
> > We began our experiments with geo-synch satellites.  We intended to move
> > to low earth orbit satellites, and then aircraft-to-aircraft relays
> > (with each airplane acting as an ever-moving IP router) but we ran out
> > of funding.  (It can be expensive working with trans-oceanic capable
> > aircraft.)
> >
> > For pilots the geo-synch links worked.  (I wanted to experiment with
> > tokenized voice like what had been done earlier at SDC for
> > communications with certain kinds of manned undersea vehicles. ATC
> > communications are highly stylized with a small core vocabulary.  This
> > would have allowed common words to be converted to nice short tokens.
> > The voice of a given speaker would not be reproduced accurately, but the
> > words would be synthetically generated at the receiving end and
> > generally were rather more clear to the listener than typical ATC voice.)
> >
> > The geo-synch path worked wasn't so great for passengers.  As usual a
> > lot of onboard caching helped.
> >
> > By-the-way, one of the lessons I took from the DARPA Robotics Challenge
> > (I worked on that for several years) is that we networking people can
> > learn a lot from the undersea sound/communications people at places at
> > MBARI and Woods Hole.  I was amazed at how they were able to pull a
> > usable signal from a very noisy channel even without forward error
> > correction.
> >
> > (On the geosync system we were using access was moderated via a ground
> > station in Texas.  One got to that moderator using Aloha style access.
> > The moderator came back with a time slot (usually a few hundred
> > milliseconds beginning at a specified time.)  So, apart from the need
> > for well synchronized clocks on the aircraft the typical access time to
> > the main channel could be several seconds.  Again, that was OK for the
> > pilots, but not for passengers.)
> >
> > There are, of course, issues that are too often overlooked when using a
> > single bent-pipe link via a geosync satellite, such as solar blanking
> > (when either the satellite transits the face of the sun from the point
> > of the view of the sending or receiving ground station or when the
> > satellite's view of a ground station is blinded because or a reflection
> > of the sun off of the earth.  At that time tracking low earth satellites
> > from a moving platform was not well developed - At Sun we had designed
> > some highly portable antenna capabilities to track low earth satellites
> > from Steve Robert's bicycle, but for that project we were aiming only at
> > about 32kbits/second, which is OK, but marginal, for non-tokenized voice.
> >
> > I of course suggested a technology we created on the Interop Show net
> > back in 1998: "Gaganet", trans-relativistic networking:
> >
> > https://www.cavebear.com/cb_catalog/techno/gaganet/
> >
> > (Some people actually believe that this was real, and not a joke.)
> >
> >           --karl--
> >
> >
> >
> >
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