Always so happy to be able to have Internet connectivity at 33,000 feet up in the air with GoGoInFlight. Though I’ve noticed something rather interesting while posting this. It appears that all graphics on Safari and Firefox while surfing up at 33,000 feet are pixelated when coming through, not just on Jonesblog, but also on other websites like Flickr and 500px.com. Why this might be is obvious for bandwidth issues, but how they are doing it, escapes me. Anyone have any ideas?
I am using this trip as a shakedown cruise of sorts for Canon’s new 8-15mm f/4 EF 8-15mm f/4 L Fisheye USM, a simultaneously amazingly wonderful lens and one that is absolutely unique in the world of photography. I did not quite believe it when Canon announced this lens, it is that unique. This lens provides a very wide field of view, up to 180 degrees and can give you some interesting special effects. I wished that I had this lens on my embed with the crew of the USS Toledo. The lens is far sharper in the corners than I might have expected and very compact. It is not quite as fast as the previous 15mm f/2.8 fisheye lens from Canon, but the tradeoff in flexibility from the zoom features more than makes up for it.
They’re probably using a proxy server to compress images on the fly, to decrease the bandwidth use on what is basically a 3G data network with tower antennas aimed to the sky instead of the ground. From what the Wikipedia article says, their throughput is about 3Mb/s shared between everyone on the flight.
Ah, very cool. I had some confusion and was wondering if Jonesblog was improperly rendering images somehow when I was initially trying to make the post.
Thanks man! As always, you seem to have the tech answers.
It all goes through a proxy and the images are redone there. If I remember correctly, AOL did this a while back in the modem days.
Yeah, you are totally right about that. I remember being horribly frustrated by AOL doing this.