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« National Free Wireless Broadband--for a Piece of the Action (Not Auction) | Main | 802.11n Slides Further into the Future »
The 30th round of air-to-ground spectrum bidding has closed and it’s given me ideas: LiveTV LLC, a subsidiary of JetBlue, is currently winning a 1 MHz license in the air-to-ground auction. (Acadia is the current winner of 3 MHz for $24.5m, but bidding will continue tomorrow and probably beyond that.)
JetBlue would like to use in-flight broadband for more than just offering passengers an Internet connection, much as Connexion by Boeing—not a bidder in this domestic auction—uses its satellite service to offer a few live broadcast channels on select airlines.
So why would LiveTV bid on a 1 MHz license, which might carry less than 1 Mbps in each direction? Here’s one scenario. When a plane lands, on-board systems sync over Wi-Fi with airport equipment to transfer massive amounts of current content to an onboard cache. Even with JetBlue’s quick turnaround time, hours of programming could be received.
While in flight, content could be continuously streamed for lower-bandwidth, smaller-format live programming, as well as cached for rewind/pause capability. This could combine the best of both worlds.
How many streams could you squeeze into 1 Mbps when you’re not offering broadband (or perhaps offering a tiny slice for email and text messaging)? I’m not clear on what the overall quality would be, but it could be enough to be interesting.
Posted by Glennf at May 18, 2006 2:27 PM
Categories: Air Travel
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Granted 1 meg wouldn't be a lot, but with mpeg4 compression, you could easily utilize it for a dozen real time streams in television quality, while still offering limited data connections.
Very cool concept, lets hope they are thinking likewise.
Posted by: John Schnipkoweit at May 19, 2006 9:35 AM
Didn't Airfone offer some sort of service like this with "Web" content at some point?
[Editor's Note: There was a deployed service at one point with Tenzing, which was folded into the company now known as OnAir (a venture of Airbus, SITA, and former Tenzing owners). They had a small walled garden, as I recall, but it didn't last long, was quite expensive, and I'm not sure how well it worked. It was on hundreds of planes at least, so I'm not sure how much money AirFone spent on that experiment.--gf]
Posted by: Carlo Longino at May 18, 2006 3:17 PM