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

[Barbara Denny]

Then there was  the SAC experiment (1986).  I think a sun workstation on the plane counts as a host and we did maintain connectivity  when feasible. This last experiment was designed to show an airborne mobile host.
barbara
    On Friday, October 3, 2025 at 01:01:23 PM PDT, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  
 
 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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