When you think about it, air travel really isn't all that great. I mean,
sure, you can get from New York to LA in 6 hours. But unlike driving where you
can pull off the highway and hit up the nearest Arby's when you get a hankering,
when you're on a plane, you're basically crammed into a 500 mph glorified bus
with wings and a bunch of sweaty strangers. And if you decided to step
out for a snack, well, I hope you packed your parachute. But even though the
airlines have been hitting us over the head recently with bag fees and
disappointing food offerings, they have at least tried to make flying a little
more tolerable by offering us inflight
wireless internet. Huzzah.
But how exactly does Wi-Fi work when
you're six miles off the ground? Why is
it so spotty? And is it possible to make
it better in the future? Well, when inflight Wi-Fi first became a thing in
the early to mid 2000s, it usually worked by beaming an internet connection
to a transponder attached to the plane using satellites, similar to how folks
in rural areas without cable, DSL or fiber infrastructure use satellite
dishes to get online. Today these systems are still in use along with
another system called airto ground transmission or ATG. This takes the form
of towers similar to cell phone towers which have the advantage of being a lot
cheaper than satellite internet but they
obviously only work over land. I haven't
seen any floating cell phone towers on open barges yet. And there are other
disadvantages too. Not only do these towers suffer from geographical
restrictions, but the service they provide can be painfully slow. As anyone
who's ever tried to stream anything on a plane probably knows. In the US, for
example, there's only a 3 megahertz
slice of the radio spectrum assigned to
airline internet. So you compare that to the average home Wi-Fi connection which
can use anywhere from 20 to 160
megahertz. So this ends up meaning then that ATG
systems don't provide great speeds usually somewhere in the neighborhood of
about 5 megabit per second. Satellite internet is faster with speeds of up to
50 megabit per second on what's called the coup band, which is the same range
of spectrum used to be satellite TV to your house. But with how many people can
fly on an average commercial airliner like the Boeing 737 at once, even a 50
megabit connection can mean doing something as simple as downloading a
word document can be frustratingly slow if lots of passengers are connected at
the same time. One of the reasons, aside
from the usual corporate greed, that Wi-Fi costs extra on your flight. And
current tech also requires airlines to bolt bulky antennas onto their planes.
These are heavy enough to have a significant effect on the plane's weight
and aerodynamics, meaning higher fuel costs, which are passed along to you,
the poor sucker who's just trying to fly home for Christmas.
But the days of inevitably crappy in-flight internet may finally be
numbered as major air carriers are now starting to install CAB band KA band
satellite antennas which have the potential due to their higher bandwidth
to reach hundreds of megabytes per second enough for streaming even on a
crowded plane where lots of people are trying to connect. In fact, JetBlue in
the United States has already deployed the new tech on some of its planes. So,
keep an eye out if you'll be using them to get to your final destination. And
even better than that, actually, some of the new CAB band antennas, such as one
being developed by the Kimeta Corporation in Washington State, are
much thinner and less power hungry than their predecessors, encouraging airlines
to install them on more planes without having to worry about how they'll affect
flight performance. So maybe one day soon you'll be able to live stream your
next transcontinental flight and show your captivated audience just how
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