Travel Technology - AA/HP: Bigger Connection Between Travel and Technology in 2009

American Airlines and HP Survey Shows Bigger Connection Between Travel and Technology in 2009.

The desire to stay connected via Wi-Fi topped the technology requests, according to a new study conducted by American Airlines and HP.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/American-Airlines-and-HP-prnews-15329127.html?.v=1

I read the title and was wondering what the heck AA would be doing with AmericaWest.

Obviously we are entering the era of onboard wifi. I just hope they find a way to disable VOIP.

I read the title and was wondering what the heck AA would be doing with AmericaWest.

Obviously we are entering the era of onboard wifi. I just hope they find a way to disable VOIP.

Oh boy I can hardly wait for people to talking on the phone. You know that is going to be the #1 use for a lot of people. I can see the VOIP applications spring up on the iPhone store targeting calls on planes. Oh joy!, yet another reason to drive!

It's already being blocked by all major WiFi providers on aircraft, and while there will always be technical workarounds, the blocking mechanisms will keep away 90% or more of the "casual" users who might be advanced enough to try to use their UMA T-Mobile phone, or Skype on their laptop. This is good enough - peer pressure and FAs will most likely do the rest of the job of keeping people quiet :)

From a technical perspective, the benefit here of how the blocking works is that it can easily be done from the network side - one policy change by a WiFi provider means that instantly it is applied across all aircraft that use it, there's no need to log into each one individually.