http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/1570531
January 15, 2003 Lufthansa and Cisco Put Wi-Fi in the Plane By Eric Griffith At last, the days of your laptop being nothing more than a method of playing Minesweeper on airline flights may be coming to an end. Deutsche Lufthansa AG is currently doing passenger trials of in-flight Wi-Fi- and Ethernet-based access to the Internet. Partnered with Boeing Company (Quote, Company Info) and Cisco Systems (Quote, Company Info), the Lufthansa flight -- part of a project called FlyNet -- will travel from Frankfurt, Germany to Washington D.C and back for the next three months. The plane in use is a Boeing 747-400 equipped with Connexion By Boeing, a system for providing high-speed, real-time data services via satellite. The network from Cisco includes five Cisco Aironet 350 Access Points, a Cisco 3640 Router, and nine digital switches for the hardwired Ethernet connections found in some seats in First Class and Business Class. The wireless, obviously, reaches everyone on the plane. The data throughput for users on the plan is about 3 Megabits per second (Mbps) downstream and 128Kbps for uploads. The service is initially free to any one on the Germany to US flights; Jonathan Hindle, strategic technology manager for the World Wide Mobile Team at Cisco, says that this trial is, in part, about finding out what people will pay for the service. [...] -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
