The Soon to be Much Friendlier Skies

Not since Virgin Atlantic promised "more experience than the name suggests" have business travelers been as excited about how to occupy themselves while traveling a mile high in the sky.

According to an article in Wired Magazine fliers on United, Alaska, American, Southwest, and Virgin America will soon have access to Wi-Fi internet on both domestic and international flights.  Bolstered by a recent survey by Forrester Research that found that 26% of leisure travelers would pay $10 for Internet access on a 2-4 hour flight and 45% would pay that amount for a flight longer than four hours companies like Aircell and Row 44 have rushed to offer carriers airborne internet through either Cellular Telephone towers or satellite connections.  If anywhere close to Aircell's projection that 75% of passengers with laptops were to use on board internet every time they flew this could be the lightning bolt that transforms mobile worker connectivity, unfortunately, depending on execution, it could also represent the agonizing return of the slow crawl of progress bars that rival the "Blue Screen of Death" as the most exasperating computing experience. 

One reason that this is such a challenging proposition is latency. The time that it takes for a packet of data to be sent by an application to travel and be received by another application, whether beamed from geosynchronous satellites orbiting 22,500 miles up or connecting via a network of cell towers will dramatically impact the user experience.  In the same way that a Yugo driving on a super speedway will not suddenly become a Lamborghini, data traveling across the network requires more than a fat pipe to achieve optimal speed.  As someone who spends all day working to accelerate some of the most distributed mobile workforces on the planet by addressing the dual challenges of latency and bandwidth constraints with our Steelhead Mobile software I am excited to hear that Road Warriors will soon have a new place where they can get their work done and am interested in seeing how they will spend their newly found free time once they can clear their inboxes in flight....

Comments

[Bonnie Scott]

brilliant analogy, joe ghory! what would be even more brilliant would be to see your shining face on the "about blog authors" page. don't hold anything back!