JetBlue just became my favorite airline…..I'm flying my way to Fort Lauderdale and next week's IT Expo when I decided to try something that back in 2008, along with now Wall Street Journal Tech Reporter, Joanna Stern, caused quite a stir with AirCell and the GoGo team. Back then Joanna and I proved that calls to someone on a GoGo equipped plane was possible. Back then, USA Today first called me a "hacker" but I convinced them to change the headline. Today, well, just call me resourceful.
So today, you see, I decided to try and repeat history….or actually, make history. Unlike most airlines in the USA that are using either GoGo or Row44, JetBlue has Fly-Fi and Exede to power their sky high broadband. And, if you want really amazing connectivity, you pay an extra $9.00 per hour, which I did.
My gamble paid off. I place one call to a friend in SoCal leaving a voice mail, another to a colleague inside Comunicano, and then returned a call from a potential client, agreeing to speak on Monday. I ended my series of calls to Jim Courtney, of Skype Journal fame and now with his own blog, Voicesontheweb. Yes, there was a bit of latency, but it was hardly noticeable.
How was this done? I used Switch with their Chrome browser app, on my Mac. Because it's WebRTC, the traffic goes over the same ports as anything in the browser, making the traffic look and appear pretty much like web traffic.
While I doubt this will cause as much of a stir as the original try at this, it does prove that as technology evolves that what wasn't possible, or what some claim can't be done, can be if you think about the answer asymmetrically.
There was a bit of barrel effect. The latency caused the conversation to go slightly unnatural. (But I have no quality reference to any other service that comes via a satellite connection.) I would not want to hold a long conversation over it at the moment.