How Does Airplane Wi-Fi Work?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2017-05-06
·
981 words · ~4 min read
0:00
When you think about it, air travel really isn't all that great. I mean,
0:03
sure, you can get from New York to LA in 6 hours. But unlike driving where you
0:09
can pull off the highway and hit up the nearest Arby's when you get a hankering,
0:14
when you're on a plane, you're basically crammed into a 500 mph glorified bus
0:21
with wings and a bunch of sweaty strangers. And if you decided to step
0:26
out for a snack, well, I hope you packed your parachute. But even though the
0:30
airlines have been hitting us over the head recently with bag fees and
0:35
disappointing food offerings, they have at least tried to make flying a little
0:40
more tolerable by offering us inflight
0:43
wireless internet. Huzzah.
0:47
But how exactly does Wi-Fi work when
0:50
you're six miles off the ground? Why is
0:53
it so spotty? And is it possible to make
0:57
it better in the future? Well, when inflight Wi-Fi first became a thing in
1:02
the early to mid 2000s, it usually worked by beaming an internet connection
1:07
to a transponder attached to the plane using satellites, similar to how folks
1:12
in rural areas without cable, DSL or fiber infrastructure use satellite
1:16
dishes to get online. Today these systems are still in use along with
1:22
another system called airto ground transmission or ATG. This takes the form
1:28
of towers similar to cell phone towers which have the advantage of being a lot
1:34
cheaper than satellite internet but they
1:37
obviously only work over land. I haven't
1:40
seen any floating cell phone towers on open barges yet. And there are other
1:45
disadvantages too. Not only do these towers suffer from geographical
1:50
restrictions, but the service they provide can be painfully slow. As anyone
1:56
who's ever tried to stream anything on a plane probably knows. In the US, for
2:02
example, there's only a 3 megahertz
2:05
slice of the radio spectrum assigned to
2:08
airline internet. So you compare that to the average home Wi-Fi connection which
2:13
can use anywhere from 20 to 160
2:17
megahertz. So this ends up meaning then that ATG
2:21
systems don't provide great speeds usually somewhere in the neighborhood of
2:25
about 5 megabit per second. Satellite internet is faster with speeds of up to
2:31
50 megabit per second on what's called the coup band, which is the same range
2:36
of spectrum used to be satellite TV to your house. But with how many people can
2:42
fly on an average commercial airliner like the Boeing 737 at once, even a 50
2:48
megabit connection can mean doing something as simple as downloading a
2:51
word document can be frustratingly slow if lots of passengers are connected at
2:57
the same time. One of the reasons, aside
3:00
from the usual corporate greed, that Wi-Fi costs extra on your flight. And
3:06
current tech also requires airlines to bolt bulky antennas onto their planes.
3:12
These are heavy enough to have a significant effect on the plane's weight
3:15
and aerodynamics, meaning higher fuel costs, which are passed along to you,
3:21
the poor sucker who's just trying to fly home for Christmas.
3:25
But the days of inevitably crappy in-flight internet may finally be
3:30
numbered as major air carriers are now starting to install CAB band KA band
3:36
satellite antennas which have the potential due to their higher bandwidth
3:41
to reach hundreds of megabytes per second enough for streaming even on a
3:46
crowded plane where lots of people are trying to connect. In fact, JetBlue in
3:51
the United States has already deployed the new tech on some of its planes. So,
3:56
keep an eye out if you'll be using them to get to your final destination. And
4:00
even better than that, actually, some of the new CAB band antennas, such as one
4:04
being developed by the Kimeta Corporation in Washington State, are
4:08
much thinner and less power hungry than their predecessors, encouraging airlines
4:13
to install them on more planes without having to worry about how they'll affect
4:17
flight performance. So maybe one day soon you'll be able to live stream your
4:22
next transcontinental flight and show your captivated audience just how
4:26
appalling the condition of the lavatory really is. Speaking of the lavatory,
4:33
nope, I can't tie this together at all. Okay. Are you racing against the clock
4:37
as a freelancer, a small business owner? It's challenging, yes. But with the
4:43
growth of the internet, there's never been more opportunities for the
4:46
self-employed. And to help meet this
4:49
need of all these small entrepreneurs
4:52
everywhere, FreshBooks is excited to announce an allnew version of their
4:57
cloud accounting software. It's been redesigned for the way you work. It's
5:02
the simplest and easiest way to be more productive, more organized, and freaking
5:07
most importantly, especially when you're starting up, to get paid quickly. You
5:12
can create and send professionallook invoices in less than 30 seconds. You
5:16
can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks to get paid up to four
5:20
days faster, which like can be the freaking difference. And you can even
5:24
see when your client has seen your invoice to put an end to all those
5:28
guessing games. So, FreshBooks is offering a 30-day unrestricted free
5:32
trial to our viewers, and all you got to do to claim it is head over to freshbooks.com/techquicky
5:37
linked in the video description and put techquicky in the how did you hear about
5:41
us section. So, thanks for watching, guys. If you like this video, like it.
5:44
If you disliked it, dislike it. If you want to check out our other channels, we've got them linked there or
5:48
somewhere, probably around here somewhere. Leave a comment with video suggestions. And as always, don't forget
5:53
to subscribe for more videos just like this one.