I spend a fair share of my time on the road. As a business traveler I am usually in ‘work-mode’ when sitting at the airport. Each year more airports are adding wireless access points which makes it much easier to stay connected. Some of these WAP’s are even free. For example, last summer I spent a week in Los Angeles. The day that I left LA I had to spend 3-4 hours at the Long Beach airport. I was pleased to find that Jet Blue Airlines provide free WAP at the Long Beach terminal. The fact that I was flying Alaska Airlines didn’t prevent me from benefiting from the foresight of the Jet Blue management.
There are two factors that prevent me from doing work while in the plane however. Battery life and lack of Internet connection.
Battery Life
My Dell laptop is a battery hog. I can usually get about 80 minutes from a battery. I travel with two batteries (which I try to keep fully charged while working at the airport). I usually fly Alaska Airlines, and to my dismay they do not provide in-flight power to coach seats. Come on Alaska! Help out your thousands of business travelers and provide some power for us. Many airlines provide in-flight power but not Alaska Air.
My laptop is my main development machine which explains why the battery life stinks. I’ve got a ton of apps running on this machine (IIS, SQL Server, firewall , various dev tools, etc) and many of them write constantly to the hard drive. Black ICE Defender, my firewall, is particularly annoying here. After running SysInternals FileMon tool on my laptop I was amazed to see how many times a minute Black ICE queries the drive. I’ve learned that if I turn of Black ICE during the flight I get another ten minutes or so of battery life.
In-Flight Internet
The second problem with trying to work at cruising altitude stems from the lack of Internet access. Yes, I can still work and complete many items from my endless to-do list but not having the Internet available cripples my research, prevents me from connecting to my source control repository and keeps me from communication from my clients and co-workers (IM, email).
Hope on the Horizon
Wireless is coming to an airplane near you sooner than you think. Defense Daily has a interesting article about wireless usage and airplane safety. The conclusions are encouraging.
- Wireless is cheap for airlines to deploy (cost ~$20,000 per plane)
- Wireless benefits passengers, cockpit and cabin crew members
- Technology is available today
Most of these wireless systems rely on satellite to communicate with the Internet.
Which airlines currently offer this service?
- Lufthansa
- British Airways (pending)
- Japan Airlines
- All Nippon Airways
Unfortunately no US carrier is currently planning to offer this service to their passengers. Do you think we can convince them to change their minds?
More resources
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1502676,00.asp
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1218395,00.html