Internet calls on planes: The genie is out...

Posted by: Dean Foust on August 27

When American Airlines, in partnership with Aircell, launched its in-flight Internet service recently, it created one big restriction: Passengers couldn’t use Skype or one of the other VOIP (Internet-based) phone services. Earlier this week I blogged about how an ingenious flier had within a mere day or two of the launch, had figured out a “end run”—using Phweet, an Internet app that makes conversations and conference calls possible between Twitter friends. I know I sounded like I was off my meds that day, but I’m not exactly enthralled about the prospect of listening to other passengers prattle on to friends about whether the stylist cut their hair too short and such. In the least, the airlines should force passengers making Internet calls to wear the headgear shown here, right(photo)?

So what’s Aircell and American gonna do about Phweet? And are there other Phweet-like services out there, that will turn the airlines efforts to shut down in-flight phone calls into a mile-high game of Whac-A-Mole? And if so, what are they? (Keep reading, because I can tell you.)

I talked to a spokeswoman for Aircell last night and she said Aircell fully expected that fertile minds would find workarounds, “but I don’t think we expected someone to find a way around it in a day.” She said Aircell engineers are already …

... working hard on a fix to prevent passengers from making calls via Phweet, but without impacting the ability of other passengers to use Flash-based applications. She wouldn't provide any details of how they're trying to block Phweet for fear of giving a roadmap to the creative brains looking for end runs.

She also noted that anyone using Phweet or any similar programs in the future are violating the "terms of service," which are spelled out in one of those little boxes you always have to “agree” to, with a mouse click, to use various services. She wouldn't say what the penalty for violating the service agreement would be, but I imagine a flight attendant could threaten to cut off a violator's Internet access.

One last point: The spokeswoman said that in customer surveys conducted before the service was launched, the majority of fliers said they didn't want to be bothered by other passengers making a VOIP phone call. (That may be true, but you also have to believe the airlines are protecting their own in-flight phone services. They never tried to stop passengers from making those calls, did they?)

So can Aircell prevent passengers from making their own calls? I’m no technologist (I used to be, but then cassettes replaced eight-track tapes) but I’ve spent a fair bit of time in the past 24 hours reading every shard of information I could find, and this is an easy call--they can't stop it, except for flight attendants spotting passengers talking through a headset and busting them. And short of that, there's no other roadblock. One poster to my earlier blog suggested travelers pack "jamming" devices, but I suspect that would create even bigger problems since they'd likely interfere with the cockpit transmissions (right?). I’ll tell you what I know but I’d like for the true geeks to jump in and educate us all.

For starters, most folks think it’ll be hard for Aircell to stamp out Phweet because it’s a flash-based application and to do so would also mean preventing passengers from using any and all other Flash-based apps on the Net. What’s more, there are other services and apps like Ventrilo, TeamSpeak and (maybe) TringMe and Hamachi that do the trick as well, as well as anonymous surfing sites like Ultimate-Anonymity that could possibly enable someone to evade the airline’s proxy (though I suspect that Aircell will block customers from using these anonymous proxy sites, just as our parent McGraw-Hill does here at work.)

A poster in another forum on this issue suggested that if the practice of VOIP calls really became a problem for the airlines, they could “purposely put intermittent interruptions…to disrupt any real time data flow, such as VOIP-like connections.” Of course, that could also aggravate passengers who log into their company’s VPN to check their email, if it causes the VPN connection to break.

In another forum, a poster asks:

“Can't this also be done using an SSH tunnel? SSH tunnels have given me a loooooot of freedom at work. Unless VPN is blocked, you can VPN to your home network, VNC to your desktop, and talk away on any service you like.”

(I don’t know enough about this technology? Can anyone help here?)

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/