[Starlink] Fwd: [ih] Internet in the Air: Was Re: Internet at Sea

[Frantisek Borsik <frantisek.borsik@gmail.com>]

Not exactly Starlink, but some goodies from Karl Auerbach et al re:
"Internet in the Air" on Internet-history mailing list:
https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2025-October/011163.html

Hit "Next message, by thread" a couple of times and get all the stuff.

Also, feel free to join:
https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

All the best,

Frank

Frantisek (Frank) Borsik


*In loving memory of Dave Täht: *1965-2025

https://libreqos.io/2025/04/01/in-loving-memory-of-dave/


https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik

Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714

iMessage, mobile: +420775230885

Skype: casioa5302ca

frantisek.borsik@gmail.com


---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Karl Auerbach via Internet-history <internet-history@elists.isoc.org>
Date: Fri, Oct 3, 2025 at 8:01 PM
Subject: [ih] Internet in the Air: Was Re: Internet at Sea
To: <internet-history@elists.isoc.org>


Thinking of Internet at Sea, there is also "Internet in the Air" (there
is also "Internet in automobiles", which has some similar issues.)

Several years back we did some work with the FAA and Boeing who were
trying to figure out how to improve air traffic control over the
mid-Pacific.  At that time there was not solid voice connectivity to
aircraft way out in the middle of the Pacific. (There were some lower
frequency radios that could do the job, much of the time, but they were
not particularly favored.)

We put modified Cisco routers and other gear onto some commercial
trans-Pacific aircraft and played.  Because pilots are used to
push-to-talk systems and long response times, we could cache voice
spurts and interleave those with other traffic.  That gave us a lot of
flexibility about adding things like redundancy in case of RF noise.

We began our experiments with geo-synch satellites.  We intended to move
to low earth orbit satellites, and then aircraft-to-aircraft relays
(with each airplane acting as an ever-moving IP router) but we ran out
of funding.  (It can be expensive working with trans-oceanic capable
aircraft.)

For pilots the geo-synch links worked.  (I wanted to experiment with
tokenized voice like what had been done earlier at SDC for
communications with certain kinds of manned undersea vehicles. ATC
communications are highly stylized with a small core vocabulary.  This
would have allowed common words to be converted to nice short tokens.
The voice of a given speaker would not be reproduced accurately, but the
words would be synthetically generated at the receiving end and
generally were rather more clear to the listener than typical ATC voice.)

The geo-synch path worked wasn't so great for passengers.  As usual a
lot of onboard caching helped.

By-the-way, one of the lessons I took from the DARPA Robotics Challenge
(I worked on that for several years) is that we networking people can
learn a lot from the undersea sound/communications people at places at
MBARI and Woods Hole.  I was amazed at how they were able to pull a
usable signal from a very noisy channel even without forward error
correction.

(On the geosync system we were using access was moderated via a ground
station in Texas.  One got to that moderator using Aloha style access.
The moderator came back with a time slot (usually a few hundred
milliseconds beginning at a specified time.)  So, apart from the need
for well synchronized clocks on the aircraft the typical access time to
the main channel could be several seconds.  Again, that was OK for the
pilots, but not for passengers.)

There are, of course, issues that are too often overlooked when using a
single bent-pipe link via a geosync satellite, such as solar blanking
(when either the satellite transits the face of the sun from the point
of the view of the sending or receiving ground station or when the
satellite's view of a ground station is blinded because or a reflection
of the sun off of the earth.  At that time tracking low earth satellites
from a moving platform was not well developed - At Sun we had designed
some highly portable antenna capabilities to track low earth satellites
from Steve Robert's bicycle, but for that project we were aiming only at
about 32kbits/second, which is OK, but marginal, for non-tokenized voice.

I of course suggested a technology we created on the Interop Show net
back in 1998: "Gaganet", trans-relativistic networking:

https://www.cavebear.com/cb_catalog/techno/gaganet/

(Some people actually believe that this was real, and not a joke.)

         --karl--




-- 
Internet-history mailing list
Internet-history@elists.isoc.org
https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
-
Unsubscribe:
https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history