« The heck is wrong with gas prices? | Main | Un-Sexiest 100 Men in the World »
April 19, 2006
Fastest Wifi Hotspot ever
So I'm on the fastest Wi-fi connection i've ever been on. 542 miles per hour to be exact.
I'm flying on a Korean Air Lines flight to Seoul, Korea. It looks like Beoing has launched a network of satellites and attached antennas on top of planes and put access points in the cabins. It's called Connexion by Boeing.
I've decided to use gmail, voipbuster, warfish, AIM, orb and dsl reports to do some testing on my own. I'm connected to at 54 Mb/s to the router and DSL Reports seems to indicate I'm connected to the rest of the world at around 80Kb/s. After this, I did a traceroute to google.com to measure up on latency. From the results I was experiencing anywhere from 500 ms to over a second. At first I was getting disconnected regularly while doing my tests, but after a tip from a friend, James, i reset my MTU size settings in XP and now my connection seeems stable.
So on to the apps. Everything works.
Gmail - web email:
There's a lot of 2 way communication going on in Gmail. So while everything works, everyting has an annoying lag to it.
Voipbuster - Voip phone service
You can hear the person you're calling just fine, but apparently the other user hears garbled voice that is partially discernable.
warfish - web based game:
Same deal with gmail, but with graphics. Therefore, my turn which normally takes about 2 minutes took about 10.
AIM - instant messaging.
AIM works pretty much the same as it does on terra firma. Nothing to report.
ORB - streaming video
Orb actually works surprisingly well. My media server is on a Comcast cable modem. The video streamed near perfectly at about 80Kb/S
However while all of these are nice to have aboard the plane, Korean Air Lines also provided a service that detracted from the value of the internet connection. They offered an on-demand library of about 100 tv shows and about 40 movies as well as Single player and networked games available at every seat on about a 8 inch screen.
Overall I was pretty much impressed at what was available. While the technology isn't perfect, It did offer all functionality that was necessary. Hopefully they'll be able to squeeze out extra bandwidth and reduce latency somehow.
Posted by Bryant at April 19, 2006 05:10 PM
Comments
This service is very cool. Hope I can try it sooon.
Posted by: RichardD at May 30, 2006 10:57 PM