How was I able to get a usable wireless connection on a flight from Austin to Tampa?
I was working on my computer and the wireless connection available ballon popped up. I thought it very strange and opened a browser and the google page popped up. I opened yahoo finance and another favorite. The signal strength was 11 mbs. I showed the stewardess and she said I wasnt allowed to have two way communications but was also amazed. I asked her if she could find out what city we were over, wondering if it mit be a city wide wifi. The pilot said we were probably over Mobile AL and that there was no charge for the internet access. (joke). But the most amazing thing was that I stayed connected until our descent to Tampa when I had to stow the computer. If I did ip config from the command prompt, is that the hosting IP? Thats not the primary question. It is how was I connected for over 40 minutes??
Internet - 4 Answers
Random Answers, Critics, Comments, Opinions :
1 :
My Question.. why did you keep it on when you aren't supposed to..? People like you make other people lose privileges...
2 :
Wow. Maybe someone else was using it using the onboard internet thing, and his WLAN was on and you were connected to the internet through him. Its highly unlikely that it was from a city wide wifi. That antenna maybe strong enough to send it to you, but I dont think your laptop antenna is strong enough to send back stuff from that far. Or maybe the plane was acting as an antenna for you? Weird, anyway.
3 :
If you have a wireless card in your computer, you should be able to get great reception from an aircraft almost everywhere. Your computer could interfere with the aircraft navigation system or take business away from their phone systems. You should be able to use it almost anytime without a problem because reception is much better at altitude.
4 :
Some cities do have city-wide WiFi MESH grids, even in very rural areas.. I know Austin has been working on this for awhile now. on a side note some Airlines are setting up onboard WiFi.. you could have been picking up a portable router, notebook, or cell phone that was connected to the interent via Satellite or another means and accidentally had their WiFi and Internet Connection Sharing turned on. If you do IPCONFIG from a command prompt or ifconfig in unix/linux the Gateway or Router IP address is the host that you are connecting thought, Always! In general any address that starts with 192.168 is a DHCP server that is NAT'ed.. 10.x is a private network. for complete details read the entire RFC on TCP/IP.
