Wireless iChat at 35,000 Feet

By now everyone should know that Lufthansa is offering hi speed wifi on many of it’s flights. People love it and planes aren’t dropping out of the sky so the FAA should really consider changing their policies on this - but that’s a rant for some other time. Outside of working online from a plane, chatting with friends on the ground seems to be the option everyone wants to explore. Apple has just put up a page about what might be the first video chat.

In what might have been the first in-air commercial videoconference, Apple product manager Kurt Knight, on the ground in Cupertino, hooked up over iChat AV with product line manager Eric Zelenka, returning to San Francisco from Munich, by leveraging Lufthansa’s new wireless high-speed broadband connection service.

As of this posting, my friend James McMurry is actually on a flight from Munich to LA and blogging it live. He hasn’t been able to get iChat AV to work, but is irc-ing with no problem! He says:

I am wondering if the plane seamlessly switches me from one satellite to another, or will I notice a drop off. Hard to tell when it would occur (if at all) and since I only have 2 fully charged batteries (equal to around 6 hours) on a 12 hour flight, I dont think I will have enough juice to find out :)

According to KisMAC there are 5 802.11b access points on board, all with the same SSID.

This is definitely the future, and kudos goes to Lufthansa for being one of the first to offer this.