Originally Posted by flysurfer
Unlike UA, there's a huge difference between C and F.
All I can say to that is that I can hardly imagine better service than I got. They were nothing short of fantastic.
Originally Posted by flysurfer
Regarding WIFI: You are the reason for many in the UA forum demanding to block Skype access as soon as UA introduces on-board internet on some of their planes next year. Especially the "walking down the aisle" behavior might be quite annoying to other pax, especially to those trying to sleep.
You make a very solid point. Frankly, I just did it for about 10 minutes... more out of curiosity than anything.... i.e. Can I maintain a solid Skype connection? I slept mos of the flight :-) I could just see two or three people walking up and down the aisles, yapping away at all hours. That would just suck.
However, blocking Skype would be useless. That would just kill Skype. What about other VOIP services? Moreover, we are finishing up an Asterisk install at our office, so we could just as easily use that, and assign any port we want, making blocking impossible. All they can do is make another rule they will need to enforce. Another issue is that as voip becomes more popular, use of Skype and other voip service will soak up what little bandwidth is available on the plane.
Originally Posted by flysurfer
Regarding IFE: Windows CE sucks. Seems like the system can't handle the load when distributing the requested information to each seat on a fully booked flight - so it crashes. My sources say that LH is trying to further compress the information (like movies) to enhance system stability (but at the cost of quality). LH is very, very unhappy with the Honeywell folks.
From what I saw (remember, I'm in the software biz), each seat has a dedicated CE device. I'm not sure what the server is running for an OS, but the controller's UI felt like it it was running on top of Linux. CE is a good choice becuase it is so light. If you have a dedicated app running on CE, it can be extremely stable. As a private pilot, I rely on CE to provide the UI for my primary navigation, and have never had a crash.
I can't think of any reason that compressing the data more would cause a CE device to be more stable. To the contrary, the more you compress it, the more horsepower the device will need to decompress. My guesses (without really understanding the problem) would be more in the area of hardware problems (bottlenecks), codec problems, or just plain sloppy programming.
That having been said, I have seen these problems on airlines enough in the past that I would love the opportunity to design & implement such a system. from scratch. Amo0ng many improvements I would love to implement, these could be made modular such that onboard crew could easily fix just about any problem in-flight with no training.