The Chicken Coop

As I write this I am seat 23F on flight SQL 286 from Auckland, New Zealand to Singapore & am connected up to the Connexion wireless internet service. I did a speed test and got ~400kbps.

This is an amazing service. Being able to catch up on work and email will in the air.

Sad thing is that Boeing is pulling the service According the Connexion web site, it will all be gone by the end of the year. There are rumours that someone else will take over the service.

I certainly hope so. With net access it at least gives you something else to do once you have seen all the movies

I totally agree. I’m on a flight from Osaka to Frankfurt (Lufthansa), and it’s really nice to be able to get hold of Leonie in-time-zone – by the time I get to St Petersburg, it’ll be about 3am in NZ, so it’d be a good day or 2 before we can get in sync. It really rocks to at least be able to gtalk her

The guts are, basicly, they have a wifi hotspot (802.11G and B). You connect to it, and you can surf to 1 or 2 places without signing in. Once you create an account – and buy 1,2,3 hours or the whole flight ($10/15/18/25 US resp), you’re on. It’s a LITTLE laggy, but mail, RSS, gtalk etc work really well. If you really wanted to, I imagine you can also setup a small wifi network and play games….

Now, can we get the for the 12 hours between auckland and Osaka / LA / other places? I hope it’s on Frankfurt -> LA, which is my next 12 hour flight……

All up, I can’t see how this could be a losing option – so many laptops, so much dead time….. Now, where’s the power plug!!