Traceroute from a Norwegian Airlines airplane

I can't excuse all the nodes in that traceroute, but the ones with a domain "direcpceu" are Hughes Communication satellite ISP nodes. Their satellites are geosynchronous, so, for two legs in each direction, those packets went a very long way before reaching the ground and coming back to the plane.

I started this trace-route within 30 seconds after the seatbelt sign was switched off (the wifi isn't enabled while taking off), so I imagine only a few people would have had the time to connect to the wifi at this point.<p>But in general, the wifi on one of these flights is very useless. I was hacking on a node.js project and used it to look up some ES5 related stuff on StackOverflow. I tried to post it to gist.github.com while in the air but wasn't even able to load the page (though google and SO loaded fine)

Next time you get the chance to ask astronauts something (in the Netherlands we had that once with Andre Kuipers I think), ask them to do a traceroute from space!

Wow, look at those response times: impressive.

I wonder if it would be practical to install upwards facing antennas on cell tower and then have a tracking dish on planes track these to cut out the satellite when over (populated) ground. If a line-of-sight microwave link could be established, it should be possible to have high-bandwidth low-latency connectivity in the air.<p>What is the effective beamwidth of a microwave antenna that needs to maintain a 50-100km link? Would the ground antennas need to be tracking as well?

A minor nitpick: I think the author means simply the airline known as "Norwegian", formally "Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA". "Norwegian Airlines" makes them sound like our main carrier, while they are in fact a (very popular and vastly successful) low cost, point-to-point-only, no-frills one.

Southwest apparently uses Row44 for in-flight WiFi. When it even works, it's absurdly slow. So slow that I'd gladly take a dial-up modem experience instead. On top of this, the company insists on slapping up a banner on the top of every webpage. If I click the "go away" button, I have to wait 30 seconds for the page to re-load. [Yes, I'm sure GreaseMonkey, etc. could rescue me] I fly on Southwest so often that I receive free WiFi, but I rarely use it. Even logging in is a multi-minute ordeal. I can't see how Row44 can generate enough revenue to justify its existence given the abysmal user experience.

Well Google will probably peer someday with direcpceu.com (Hughes)<p>I think it's using a satellite network in orbit just like people with rural internet?<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PanAmSat" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PanAmSat</a>

I think Louis CK responded to this best: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3dYS7PcAG4" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3dYS7PcAG4</a>

Am I missing something? Why is this on first page of HN. Not downplaying, I honestly don't know.