How long until Chambers says "Cisco needs to be in the Airline WI-FI business" and buys another company?
I was on a flight recently and that airline had in flight WI-FI, so while I was sitting in first class I decided to give it a try since I had lots of room to work. At first I was all happy of the idea, that I could get all of my news, email and do some searches while on a 6 hour flight. But then you figured out everyone else is doing the same thing. The service got really slow, really fast to the point I was about to turn it off when I tried my vpn. My first trying did not work, but then I tried my backup vpn on a different port and it worked.
I was then able to connect my Riverbed Mobile Client on my laptop to the network; things started to speed up and got better. My total reduction was 91% of bandwidth during the flight, which made me happy. I pulled down a few files for the guy sitting next to me and put them on his usb drive, a very grateful Frenchman.
While I do like the idea, I think the airlines or the companies running these WI-FI services have some work to do. They need to look at some acceleration services to speed things up, it does not matter to me what they look at as long as it is something. They also need to put QOS on for each user, this way each user has a good experience and your bandwidth does not go from good to bad.
The guy sitting next to me joked that this will make Cisco come up with new certifications, like CCAE, Cisco Certified Airline Expert. I thought it was funny and told him that he is more than likely right, which will be right after the CCEE, Cisco Certified Ethernet Expert and the CCTE, Cisco Certified Testing Expert.
If you have flown and used the new WI-FI services, please let me know your experience. Did you have your vpn ports blocked by the service? How was your speed, what did you pay? How long will it take Chambers to say Cisco needs to be in the airline business and buy one of these companies? You know it is going to happen, I woudl hope Cisco trys to get back to its roots to bring businessd back.
