The last time I sat in a plane "with power and WiFi", the seat outlet crashed¹ when I plugged into it.
The time prior to that, the outlet had been so abused that the plug just fell out of the socket.
The time prior to that, the plane did not have the advertised features.
Perhaps the signal strength is great, but the actual problems I as a passenger experience seem to be a bit divorced from the potatoes here.
¹"You can crash an outlet?" I'm an SRE. I can do anything. Plug plug into outlet, green light turns off. Wait like 5s, light turns back on. 1s later, green light turns off. Loop. It's a crashloop, essentially. No power provided.
arghwhat · 3h ago
The tricky part isn't getting signal strength in the cabin, it's managing a cabin full of devices trying to talk using a technology that only allows one radio to talk at any given time.
You need many very low power base stations at spaced out channels to make this work. Nowadays WiFi 7 provides some nice anti-congestion and channel optimization features as well, but back then, one slow device was all it took to render wifi useless.
walterbell · 3h ago
> Frederic Rosseneu of the European Potato Trade Association Europatat said the organisation was "looking forward to other experiments in which spuds can help to make our lives more convenient".
Potato submarines!
milner_t · 4h ago
Potatoes and frozen chickens are used in various standardized qualification tests for airplanes.
privatelypublic · 42m ago
Thought it was thawed chickens.
Scoundreller · 3h ago
[2012]
gmuslera · 2h ago
They need to be careful of not ending in another place in the long Earth.
The time prior to that, the outlet had been so abused that the plug just fell out of the socket.
The time prior to that, the plane did not have the advertised features.
Perhaps the signal strength is great, but the actual problems I as a passenger experience seem to be a bit divorced from the potatoes here.
¹"You can crash an outlet?" I'm an SRE. I can do anything. Plug plug into outlet, green light turns off. Wait like 5s, light turns back on. 1s later, green light turns off. Loop. It's a crashloop, essentially. No power provided.
You need many very low power base stations at spaced out channels to make this work. Nowadays WiFi 7 provides some nice anti-congestion and channel optimization features as well, but back then, one slow device was all it took to render wifi useless.
Potato submarines!