The Steve Rubel Stream

I just spent four days on the North Carolina coast. AT&T's signal is EDGE (2G) where I was, and it was slammed with all the vacationers. At least five times I found myself staring at my iPhone waiting for something to happen. Usually I gave up. Then I got home to Carrboro and saw my phone had automatically acquired the town's free wireless network. No points for guessing which experience I prefer.

I love this too - having the net available on a flight. It will be funny to look back on this later as a limited-availability luxury.

But the prospect of enduring people's audible chats via the web during flights is somewhat terrifying. I am quite sure your approach to this is 1,000,000 times more considerate than the average joe.

"Can you see me? I can't hear you. Oh, hi! Wait - are you hearing me? This is awesome! What? What? Yeah, I'm on the plane. Oh, nothing. Just sitting here."

Did you get any attention when you were testing this out? Any haters? This is definitely one of those things that I would probably try, but would also end up boiling over if I was subjected to someone else doing it. 99% of the population can't seem to carry on a phone/web/cell call without screaming into it. :)

I wonder how many years it will be until we just take being connected to the internet for granted. My grandfather lived before airplanes criss-crossed the globe and I take that for granted. My kids will likely never know what it was like to be "wired" to the internet.

Thinking about the availability of the Internet always reminds me of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I still can't believe there's no iPhone app that all it does is have a big welcoming icon saying "Don't Panic" and when you click it it connects you to Wikipedia.

I wonder how this will work on 6rounds...

Yeah, I have clipped photos of the same thing on my computer using the gChat to my friend in India (yes, India). It is amazing. Go google!

What was the other passenger's reaction to your chatting?

Low and brief is OK.  I hope my fellow passengers on American Airlines would be so respectful.  Too often they have to tell someone I am here, going there and be there when.  An email or text msg via web would suffice.

I agree with some of the other comments - I love the idea of wifi en route, but shudder at the idea of sitting next to someone using their phone voice for a large portion of the flight. It's bad enough on the train.

As for the idea of being connected everywhere - yep, it's amazing. I just met someone in the library today who is still on dial up. I didn't realise anybody was. My daughter will never know what dial up is/was.

Too cool!

Next steps should be for mobile telephone companies to lower their rooming costs. I do not like the hassel in which country I use my mobile internet connection. There are areas we a far away from globalization. Companies like T-Mobile are global corporations but you still have to pay allot using their net in a foreign country. T-Mobile is just an example the same is the case for the others out there.

Cloud computing? ;)

That's really cool. I hope all airlines from all over the world would be able to implement that. No more boring flight hours..lolz

I was tempted while on a Virgin America flight to make a Skype call, until I saw this: "Virgin America does not typically allow Voice-Over-IP (VoIP) products like Skype video call in-flight due to concerns about maintaining a quiet, restful cabin environment, guests can currently use Gogo® to Skype via the instant message feature, in addition to e-mailing, tweeting, updating their Facebook pages and any of the myriad other ways the web is keeping people connected."