So I took a little a break from working on gdgt to get on Virgin America’s inaugural Aircell GoGo WiFi party flight, posting this at altitude. If you haven’t already caught one of the early Aircell flights on Delta, American, or Air Canada, their now-active GoGo service provides in-flight internet. So far, as far as party planes go, this one hasn’t been to raucus — probably because everyone’s been geeking out on their laptops.
Quick facts:
- The service is a shared high-power EV-DO Rev. A connection, at 3.6Mbps downstream and 1.8Mbps upstream.
- By April, 100% of Virgin America’s flights will have GoGo service. Dayumn!
- So far I’ve been getting about 1Mbps down, and 200Kbps up — pretty good considering that this is about as pinned as the system is going to get. There are only about 150 people on it right now, you know?
- Latency is between 200-500ms, sometimes higher. Reasonable latency, though.
- The system uses 802.11a/b/g, although it’s an open AP (i.e. no encryption).
- Aircell intends to block voice and video chat to keep things less obnoxious for travelers. It’s working in flight though — people are doing iChat sessions. But part of this inaugural flight will have live YouTube streaming, so one should expect to have this cut off later.
- BitTorrent works! It’s not crazy fast, but I’m peering with about 8 nodes. I wouldn’t expect this to work when the service launches.
- GoGo has a built-in traffic shaper that keeps an eye out for those using more traffic than others. If you’re consuming too much, it’ll scale you back (although no one has a hard cap). If you’re the only one on GoGo (say, on a red-eye at 4am) then you can go crazy, you won’t be scaled back. Still, I’m sitting next to my old pal Brian Lam from Giz, and I’d wager the two of us are somehow taking up about 80% of the plane’s bandwidth.
- Virgin America isn’t filtering content, so feel free to cast a glance over your shoulder and engage your browser’s private mode.
Any thing else you want to know?
Filed under: Transportation, Wireless
On Virgin America’s inaugural GoGo WiFi flight: this post published from 35,000 feet originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Tags: aircell, already-caught, america, browser, delta, entry, Gizmodo, gogo, inaugural, transportation, virgin, virgin-america, wager-the-two, wifi, wireless
So Gizmodo recently challenged Wired to a game of Gears of War 2. We thought this would be a gentlemanly, civil interaction, devoid of childish name calling and smack talking that typically punctuates affairs of this sort.
Oh were we wrong.
Jason Chen just recently posted this clip on the Giz. Read between the lines; you guys can tell he’s not actually kidding!
Okay Giz, it’s on. Hope you enjoy being eviscerated every moment you turn a corner. Consider this your anti-warning.
[Via the Giz]
Swiss watchmaker Romain Jerome may not be as well-known as a Rolex or a Patek Philippe. But it is looking to stand apart by creating watches with some very exclusive material.
The company’s latest collection called ‘Moon Dust-DNA’ uses materials such as moon dust and fragments from spacecrafts Apollo XI, Soyuz and the International Space Station.
It is "inspired by and incorporates the DNA heritage of major figures in the conquest of space," says the company.
A Romain Jerome watch from the collection will have a lunar dial with tiny craters that will be filled with mineral deposit including Moon dust, a 46-mm steel and titanium case with steel from the Apollo XI space shuttle and rusted steel paws that include fragments of the Soyuz spacecraft. The strap is composed of fibers from a space a spacesuit worn during the International Space Station mission.
The company says it guarantees the origin of each of the materials used in the watch by a legal document authenticated in Switzerland. And each piece will be accompanied by a certificate from the Association of Space Explorers.
In the past, Romain Jerome has done a Titanic-DNA collection using steel and coal from the remains of the ill-fated ship.
Romain Jerome will make 1,969 Moon Dust DNA-collection watches, symbolic of the year man first landed on the moon. The watches will retail between $15,000 and $500,000.
Sounds like a lot of moonshine to us.
[via The Age]
Belkin on Wednesday released a dongle that enables consumers to switch from a PC to a Mac in one simple step.
The $50 USB-to-USB dongle comes bundled with Migration Assistant
software, which automates the process of copying over music, movies,
photos, preferences and other files from a Windows PC onto a Mac.
Sounds nifty, but it’s likely you’d only use it one or two times. Plus,
the Apple Store will do this for you for free. $50 for self-sufficiency
and peace of mind. Worth it to you?
Product Page [Belkin via Gizmodo]
Photo: Belkin
A web site claims hearing from an unnamed, "reliable source" that the next major iPhone firmware update is just 10 days away.
The source told iPhone Hellas that iPhone 2.2 will be available for download Nov. 21. Earlier, iPhone Hellas published images purporting to be leaked screenshots
revealing new features, including direct podcast downloading, Google
Street view, a redesigned Safari browser interface and others.
As
always, rumors from an unnamed source should be taken with a grain of
salt. But Nov. 21 would be a realistic release date for iPhone 2.2.
Apple released iPhone 2.1
on Sept. 12 — two months and one day after the release if iPhone 2.0.
Therefore, it’s reasonable to expect a major upgrade very soon.
iPhone OS v2.2 to be released on 21 November! [iPhone Hellas via Gizmodo]
Richard Solo is a name that, in its diminutive form, is surely as much of a single-handed euphemism as Han Solo (think about it, but not too much). Additionally, it is the maker of the RichardSolo 1800, an extended battery for the iPhone which will also give you something more innocent to do with your hands.
The RichardSolo 1800 is an 1800 mAh battery pack which snaps into the iPhone’s dock connector. It has enough power to completely recharge a dead iPhone and still have “reserve power left over”. For what? Well, for the built-in laser pointer and flashlight, of course. To charge, you plug the iPhone into the dongle, and then the dongle into a USB wall-wart which juices both simultaneously.
The device is $70, but we prefer the FastMac iV which costs just $10 more and eschews the laser for an LED that doubles as a “flash” for the iPhone’s camera. It also works as a case for the iPhone, wrapping around it instead of dangling dangerously off the end. The Dick Solo version comes with a car charger and a USB extender cable, and is available now.
Product page [Richard Solo via the Giz]
About a month ago, Wired.com editor Leander Kahney crucified me when I wrote about a man killing a bear with a stick: A piece of wood is hardly considered a "gadget," he said, gently leaning his knee on my throat. But a stick was cool enough to make it into the National Toy Hall of Fame in New York on Thursday.
The stick, along with the baby doll and the skateboard, joined the Strong National Museum of Play’s lineup of classics, including Mr. Potato Head, the cardboard box and the Atari 2600 game system, according to a CNN story.
Well deserved. Sticks are awesome, dammit! Back when we were kids, a stick was whatever we wanted it to be: A light saber, a fishing rod, a pipe bomb. Long live the stick.
Stick, skateboard, Baby Doll enter Toy Hall of Fame [CNN via Gizmodo]
Photo: Lenny&Meriel/Flickr
AT&T CEO Ralph De La Vega is no fan of Google’s Android mobile operating system.
De La Vega says AT&T is evaluating Android and "is not prepared" to carry phones featuring the newly launched OS on its network. "The
platform is still evolving and needs to open up even more to offer a
wider array of non-Google applications," quotes the San Francisco Chronicle.
The comments come two weeks after Sprint CEO Dan Hesse expressed similar sentiments when he said Android isn’t good enough yet to put the Sprint brand on it.
This is not good news for Google. The success of Android will eventually depend on how telecom carriers in North America embrace devices with the OS.
So far, only T-Mobile seems to have jumped on to the Android bandwagon. The company was the first to launch the HTC G1 phone based on Android.
Can Google convince others to sign on?
Photo: T-Mobile G1 (Dan Patterson/Flickr)
If Apple isn’t going to fix all the stuff that bugs you about the
iPhone, you might as well hack and mod it to be better, right? A hacker
(in the video above) took that idea to the extreme and attached a
physical QWERTY keyboard to his Jailbroken iPhone.
Early adopters of the handset often complain about its virtual keyboard, but those concerns seem to fade away as people get a feel for it. I personally don’t mind it anymore. What
I really want is for Apple to let the damn keyboard flip into landscape mode for typing e-mails, notes, text messages and so forth.
YouTube [via CrunchGear via Gizmodo]
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