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A Different Kind Of Air Port (6/14/01)
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Here's some good news for you frequent air travelers out there; if you get bored burning CDs, syncing your handheld, transferring your digital photos, watching DVD movies, and editing your video footage on those long flights (and let's be honest; who doesn't?), pretty soon you'll have yet another thing to do in your middle seat. According to a MacCentral article that was forwarded to us by faithful viewer Jef Van der Voort, it won't be long before travelers on selected American, Delta, and United flights will be able to fork over some cash in return for a live Ethernet cable-- one whose pipe extends far beyond the limits of the jet itself. Yes, kiddies, real Internet access is reaching for the skies.
Thanks to Connexion by Boeing, if you happen to be a passenger on one of the 1,500 wired jets planned by the three airlines, you'll be able to wile away the hours by surfing while flying. And we're not talking about that cheesy 9600 bps connection you might be able to get by plugging your modem into the AirFone and paying three bucks a minute; this is broadband, baby, with zippy 5 Mbps download speeds. That's half the transfer rate of wired Ethernet-- though you'll have to share that bandwidth with any other passengers using the service as well. (Meanwhile, uploads are at 1.5 Mbps-- nothing to sneeze at.)
There are a few catches, of course. One is that the service will cost $20 an hour. But considering that dialing in via the AirFone for that long would cost you over nine times as much (for roughly 1/500th the speed), we don't consider that much of a problem. Another is that you'll need an Ethernet port-- oh, wait, all Mac portables have shipped with Ethernet standard for the past three years. Never mind. The last catch is the biggest, though: you'll have to wait until "the second half of 2002" before you can dish out a double-sawbuck in exchange for an hour's time on a high-speed pipe at 35,000 feet. At this point, the airlines' only progress is to have signed "Letters of Intent" to get this plan, um, in the air. Still, we're already looking forward to next year's flight home for Christmas. Unreal Tournament, anyone?
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SceneLink (3116)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 6/14/01 episode: June 14, 2001: After half a decade of wandering the Windows desert, Stewart Alsop makes a tentative step back into the lush greenery of Macdom. Meanwhile, a trio of airlines are planning to introduce in-the-air broadband Internet access for $20 an hour, and CNET interviews Dell's general manager of education about whether or not Apple's lost its edge...
Other scenes from that episode: 3115: Never Too Late To Return (6/14/01) Hands up, who remembers Stewart Alsop? Because for a long time he sure didn't remember the Mac. For the uninitiated, here's the skinny: Alsop is a writer for Fortune who used to be a Mac fan, but back in the Dark Days of 1996, he lost the faith; in a very public recantation, he not only dumped his own Macs, but also told his various business partners to do the same-- which they did... 3117: Never Let Him Off The Hook (6/14/01) May Steve bless the journalists who actually insist on answers to the questions they ask! One of our biggest pet peeves is when an interviewer poses a question, the interviewee tries to slime his or her way out of answering by saying something that completely and utterly avoids the subject-- and then the interviewer moves on like nothing happened...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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