Gadgetory

when you think about it air travel really isn't all that great I mean sure you can get from New York to LA in six hours but unlike driving where you can pull off the highway and hit up the nearest Arby's when you get a hankering when you're on a plane you're basically crammed into a 500 mile an hour glorified bus with wings and a bunch of sweaty strangers and if you decided to step out for a snack well I hope you packed your parachute but even though the airlines have been hitting us over the head recently with bag fees and disappointing food offerings they have at least tried to make flying a little more tolerable by offering us in-flight wireless internet huzzah but how exactly does Wi-Fi work when you're six miles off the ground why is it so spotty and is it possible to make it better in the future well when inflight Wi-Fi first became a thing in the early to mid 2000s it usually worked by beaming an internet connection to a transponder attached to the plane using satellites similar to how folks in rural areas without cable DSL or fiber infrastructure use satellite dishes to get online today these systems are still in use along with another system called air-to-ground transmission or ATG this takes the form of towers similar to cell phone towers which have the advantage of being a lot cheaper than satellite internet but they obviously only work over land I haven't seen any floating cell phone towers on open barges yet and there are other disadvantages too not only do these towers suffer from geographical restrictions but the service they provide can be painfully slow as anyone who's ever tried to stream anything on a plane probably knows in the US for example there's only a three megahertz slice of the radio spectrum assigned to airline internet so you compare that to the average home Wi-Fi connection we can use anywhere from twenty to a hundred and sixty megahertz so this ends up meaning then that eighty G systems don't provide great speeds usually somewhere in the neighborhood of about five megabit per second satellite internet is faster with speeds of up to 50 megabit per second on what's called the Ku band which is the same range of spectrum used to be satellite TV to your house but with how many people can fly on an average commercial airliner like the Boeing 737 at once even a 50 megabit connection can mean doing something as simple as downloading a word document can be frustratingly slow if lots of passengers are connected at the same time one of the reasons aside from the usual corporate breed that Wi-Fi costs extra on your flight and current tech also requires airlines to pull bulky antennas onto their planes these are heavy enough to have a significant effect on the plane's weight and aerodynamics meaning higher fuel costs which are passed along to you the poor sucker who's just trying to fly home for Christmas but the days of inevitably crappy in-flight internet may finally be numbered as major air carriers are now starting to install cob and ka-band satellite antennas which have the potential due to their higher bandwidth to reach hundreds of megabytes per second enough for streaming even on a crowded plane where lots of people are trying to connect in fact JetBlue in the United States has already deployed the new tech on some of its planes so keep an eye out if you'll be using them to get to your final destination and even better than that actually some of the new command antennas such as one being developed by the kinetic corporation in Washington State are much thinner and less power-hungry than their predecessors encouraging airlines to install them on more planes without having to worry about how they'll affect flight performance so maybe one day soon you'll be able to livestream your next transcontinental flight and show your captivated audience just how appalling the condition of the lavatory really is speaking of the lavatory no I can't tie this together at all okay are you racing against the clock as a freelancer a small business owner it's challenging yes but with the growth of the Internet there's never been more opportunities for the self-employed and to help meet this need of all these small entrepreneurs everywhere freshbooks is excited to announce an all-new version of their cloud accounting software it's been redesigned for the way you work it's the simplest and easiest way to be more productive more organized and freaking most importantly especially when you're starting up to get paid quickly you can create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds you can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks to get paid up to four days faster which light can be the freaking difference and you can even see when your client has seen your invoice to put an end to all those guessing games so FreshBooks is offering a 30-day unrestricted free trial to our viewers and all you got to do to claim it is head over to freshbooks comm slash tech quickie linked in the video description and put tech quickie in the how did you hear about us section so thanks for watching guys if you liked this video like it if you just liked it dislike it if you want to check out our other channels we've got them linked there or somewhere probably around here somewhere leave a comment with video suggestions and as always don't forget to subscribe for more videos just like this one