Both Alaska and Southwest have previously announced plans to operate in-flight internet using a satellite-based solution from Row 44.  Now another player has finally launched service in the same space.  ViaSat will also be offering Ku-band satellite connectivity using pretty much the same technology as Row 44, including the same antenna provider.  And ViaSat doesn’t seem to have any commercial carriers signed up to partner with.  But they also don’t really seem to care about that.

They’ve inked a deal with Lufthansa’s Technik group to provide connectivity to private planes, including arriving as standard equipment on some models.  What does this mean to you?  Probably very little unless you’re in the market for a Bombardier Challenger 300.  But seeing another player in the in-flight broadband space is always a nice thing, as it means more opportunities for carriers to implement solutions and keep us connected on the go.

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After months and months of anticipation, Sprint has finally launched their XOHM (WiMax) service.  In downtown Baltimore, MD.  With expectations of 2-4 Mbit service on average and peaks of 10 Mbit the bandwidth is certainly impressive.  The location of the service, however, is not.  Baltimore is a relatively small city (likely why it was chosen) and the downtown area is relatively poor, so I’m not sure that this will actually benefit too many people.  But at least Sprint managed to get one city up and running.

No voice service on the network, yet, and a modem will run you $45 if you’re in the neighborhood.  Oh, and the service will be $10/day, $35/month or $50/month for unlimited data for life.  I don’t understand that last one and how it is different from the $35 plan, but I’m sure it isn’t just that they are charging $15 more for the same thing.

Chicago and Washington, DC appear to be the next cities scheduled for activation, with Dallas, Fort Worth, Boston, Providence and Philadelphia following eventually.

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With the announcement a couple weeks ago that Southwest has finally set a date for the testing of their in-flight Internet connectivity it seems that the majority of the US-based carriers have something in the works.  Runway Girl has a couple good posts (Post 1; Post 2) about the various options, but I haven’t been able to find an exhaustive list of all the offerings from all the carriers.  So I decided to put one together.  Here are the airlines, the service and the status of the deployment efforts:

• American Airlines - Aircell’s gogo service currently operational on 767s for NYC-LAX/SFO/MIA routes.
• Alaska Air - Row 44, currently planned for testing on a single plane.
• Jet Blue - LiveTV, but only on one plane and no word on when additional rollout will happen.
• Continental - LiveTV on the entire domestic-focused fleet, starting in January ‘09
• Delta - Aircell’s gogo service, expected on the MD8x planes first and on the entire fleet by mid-2009
• Frontier - Likely LiveTV since they already use the service for television on the planes, but I haven’t seen an official release.
• United - Nothing planned/announced
• US Airways - Nothing planned/announced, though back in February they said they were looking at it.  The fact that they are pulling the entertainment systems to save weight makes me suspect of their ability to actually get it into their planes soon, particularly since they have nothing specific announced, but they supposedly are looking at it.
• Southwest - Row 44, currently planned for testing in Q4 ‘08
• Virgin America - Aircell’s gogo service coming soon and will be fleet-wide.

The Aircell and LiveTV services are both terrestrial, which Row 44 is a satellite-based solution.  Row 44 and Aircell’s gogo are both supposed to be “full” Internet service while LiveTV is very up front about the fact that they are providing access to a very limited subset of the internet, and they’ve increased the content available recently.

Hopefully this helps (and I didn’t mess up the details too much).  If I did, I’m sure you’ll let me know.

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Boingo has a great wireless network for Wi-Fi access around the world.  If you’re on the road they seem to be a pretty good alternative to paying on a site-by-site basis, and it is even a decent price often just for a daily.  Well, it seems that they are pretty keen on getting more subscribers on their monthly plan rather than holding out for the daily subscribers, so they’ve cut their subscription pricing drastically, from $21.95/month to $9.95 for folks joining up now.

The key is to use promo code UNL01090USD0 when you are signing up.

Originally noted here.  Thanks!

UPDATE: Three caveats about this offer.  First is that it expires July 31st. Second is that the “unlimited monthly usage” is actually 3,000 minutes/month.  So don’t leave it logged on overnight at the hotel and you should be fine.  Third is that it is only good in North America; global roaming will cost you per minute.

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WiMax has long been seen as a potential competitor to cellular-based data networks, allowing a combination of high speeds and reasonable range.  Plus roaming between access points is supposed to be way easier to manage than normal WiFi connections.  Of course, it also requires a whole new infrastructure to be built out and it isn’t backwards compatible with other technologies such as WiFi, so it is a bit of a hard sell to drive adoption.  Still, companies are developing solutions.  Sprint has been working on their XOHM network for a while now, with a launch expected any day now or in several months, depending on who is giving statements to the press on any given day.

Things like this seem to take off more quickly in Europe, with more densely populated cities and a populace generally more willing to adopt the new technologies.  And so it is that Amsterdam was the target of a WiMax network launch this week.  With access priced at 20 Euro per month and unlimited download capacity the offering is priced lower than most other broadband options, so they’ve got a chance to take over a decent market share.  At the same time, however, the company’s management acknowledges that unless they are able to expand their coverage area and their subscriber base pretty significantly that they won’t be able to stick around too long.

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If you regularly travel with tons of data, then this drive may be just what you are looking for.

Enclosed in the tiny aluminum case are 2 500Gb 2.5" drives. The Little Big Disk has ports for USB, Firewire 800 and eSATA.

It’s priced at pretty insane $699 which is hard to justify when you consider that a regular desktop drive of the same size can be found for $169. But if size matters, then this is the largest capacity drive in the smallest enclosure available at the moment.

LaCie Little Big Disk

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Asus may not have delivered the $199 super notebook we were promised, but they have created an entirely new market for compact notebooks (called Netbooks).

The next big player to join the gang is MSI with the "Wind".

The MSI wind is powered by a 1.6GHz Intel Atom chip, has a 10" display (capable of 1024×600), 1Gb of ram, a spacious 80Gb SATA drive and even comes complete with Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth and a 1.3MP webcam.

In every possible way it is better than the Asus Eee PC, plus it’s only $80 more than the most common Eee (the 4G).

That’s right; the MSI Wind will be released on the 27th for just $479.99.

You can learn more about this machine here and a snazzy flash animated demo with horrible music can be found here.

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With the large variety of malware and attack surfaces for systems on public networks, protecting your laptop is a critical aspect of working on the road.  Keeping out viruses, spam, spyware and other attacks generally requires several different applications, either from a “security suite” package or individual apps from several sources.  Yoggie, an Israeli-based security company, addresses this need from a very different angle.  They provide a USB (or PC Card) security appliance: full security in a dongle the size of a normal USB thumb-drive.  The appliance promises an integrated hardware firewall as well as complete security protection, and it does so without installing the bloat-ware that most security suites seem to have become.  I took the Gatekeeper Pico for a test drive the past few days, with mixed results.

The device arrives as promised, with almost zero software to install on your local machine.  That is a great benefit, preventing the scanning process from taking over your machine and killing the performance.  I connected the device, installed the driver and hit my first snag.  A quick reinstallation of the software cleared that up and I was off and running.  The installation process places a network shim on your computer, effectively intercepting all network traffic and passing it through the Yoggie appliance before allowing it to or from your computer.  The concept is great, especially since it offloads the overhead.  Unfortunately, the implementation appears to be lacking based on my testing.

The appliance claims 12 built-in security appliance functions.  I was not able to test all of them, but the ones I did test had mixed results.  The anti-virus feature worked great, blocking the web page with the virus on it from loading with a very clear indication of what it was doing:

For other functions, such as the firewall feature, the indication of the Yoggie intervention was not as clear.  I spent several minutes attempting to copy some files via FTP and TFTP without any indication from Yoggie that it was blocking the traffic, either actively during the action or passively during in the log files.  Still, disabling the Yoggie appliance resolved my connectivity issues, so I can only assume that the appliance was the cause of those troubles. 

The folks at Yoggie make grand claims about performance impact of their device, specifically that the impact is virtually zero on the computer.  And while I generally found this to be true, I also found that there was a bit more to it.  While the Yoggie was enabled I found that download speeds on my cable modem connection were significantly impacted:

Not only was the performance impacted by ~35% for bandwidth and way worse for the ping test but the appliance actually prevented the upload speed test from running. And again, it did so without any useful information to me as a user.  I was concerned that it would prevent general file uploads via web connections and confirmed that to not be the case - I was able to upload flies just fine using web forms or ActiveX controls, but there remained some questions in my mind at this point.

I took a look at the UI to confirm the settings and found the dashboard interface to be pretty, but not really all that useful:

The gage indicators are easy to understand, but even the detailed logging still didn’t contain information about the actions that the device had taken.

I had to head in to the office at this point and pulled the device out for the travel.  Upon connecting to the office network I quickly learned that the network shim remains active, even when the appliance is removed.  This meant zero network connectivity if it wasn’t plugged in.  I like this configuration as it allows for administrative control over the appliance setup and prevents users from overriding those settings without permission.  As an added bonus, if you’re deploying a lot of these appliances you can configure them to receive their configuration instructions from a central source rather than individually programming them.  This is a huge benefit for enterprise environments.

I disabled the device for a bit to get some real work done since I didn’t have time to worry about testing it for a couple hours.  This is when things started to go VERY wrong for me.  I experienced three Windows crashes (Blue Screen of Death) in the next 8 hours of system usage.  These were the first BSoDs I’ve had on my Vista laptop in months, if ever.  All of the crashes indicated device driver issues and all happened with the Yoggie appliance in the disabled mode for the software and the hardware not connected at all.  I cannot say for certain that the Yoggie caused these crashes, but it is the only thing I changed on my system.  I also noticed that each crash was triggered by my initiating a network connection to a web site or other service, which means that the Yoggie Gatekeeper was involved in the action.

I didn’t get to test the built-in Anti-Spam or Anti-Phishing tools since I don’t have any accounts that would need extra protection there.  And I have no idea what a “Layer-8 Security Engine (TM)” is since last time I checked there were still only 7 layers in the OSI model.  I also don’t know what “PENTAGON LEVEL security protection” is, so I cannot evaluate how well they performed on that front.  The Anti-Virus is only active on the network connection, so if you use a USB-drive or other means to bring files onto your computer you are not protected there.  That is a benefit of having locally installed AV software installed, though there are the obvious performance issues there as well.

Overall I was not particularly impressed with the Yoggie Gatekeeper Pico appliance.  For very basic usage by non-technical users it probably would provide OK protection, but without indications that it is intercepting traffic, users would likely get very frustrated very quickly if things stop working.  For someone more technically inclined it seems that the interruptions in service would be more pronounced and more frustrating, though hopefully those users would know how to get around the issues.  I love the concept of the security appliance that you take with you, but this one seems to miss on the implementation, at least on my laptop.

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Voodoo (now an HP subsidiary) just announced the Envy 133. In every possible way, this thing is everything the Macbook air should have been.

It has an HDMI port, 2 USB ports (one is a combined USB/eSATA port), it supports internal mobile broadband cards, it has a backlit keyboard, LED screen, low light webcam, an instant on OS (which offers access to Skype and a web browser in under 10 seconds). The power brick can charge the machine AND function as a Wi-Fi to Ethernet bridge.

Storage options include an 80Gb 4200rpm drive or a 64Gb SSD drive. It even comes complete with an  external DVD recorder. Memory can be expanded to 2Gb, and the battery is removable!

It weighs 3.4 pounds and is 12.7×9.0×0.7 inches (the Macbook Air weighs 3 pounds and is 12.8×8.94×0.76 (at the thickest end).

The starting price is $2099, which is $300 more than the Macbook Air.

Source: Laptop Magazine mini review

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JetBlue’s LiveTV subsidiary has been working for the past several months on getting their in-flight Internet service up and running.  Sadly, the initial service offering was limited to Yahoo! mobile and BlackBerry access (assuming you have a WiFi BB), so it wasn’t really all that useful for the vast majority of the traveling public.  As of today, however, the offering has expanded significantly, making the solution much more tolerable for folks looking to keep in touch while in the air.

The expanded services will provide customers with a simple yet extensive search and discover option from Amazon.com, as well as a more diverse email and messaging platform open to both Microsoft Exchange corporate email accounts and leading webmail providers such as Gmail, AOL Mail, Hotmail and Windows Live Mail.

It still isn’t “full” Internet access, but based on the limited bandwidth that LiveTV has available to them, this seems to be the best use of the capacity. 

The new services are available today on the one plane that JetBlue has outfitted with the service - BetaBlue - and is expected to start expanding into more planes in early ‘09 on Continental airlines.  No word from JetBlue on when their fleet will start to include the new service on more planes.

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