32I am pleased to announce that my departure went without a hitch. I am currently about half-way to Detroit, blogging at 11500 meters above the Atlantic Ocean. I am connected via Lufthansa’s on-board Internet plan. It’s 27 US$ for the entire flight, but of course I just **had** to give it a try. It does work fairly well, but as expected it’s pretty slow. There are also disconnections now and then. It’s easy to set up (you really don’t have to configure much except disable your proxy settings, and set your notebook to use the Connexion WLAN) and well documented via the Lufthansa on-board magazine.

I don’t think anything gets filtered out. I am ssh’ing to my private servers without problems, so you could always tunnel whatever you want to access. Since anybody on the plane can listen in on what you’re doing, and since the connectivity is run by Boeing and thus routed via Seattle, using some form of encryption (vpn, ssh, whatever) is a very good idea. I’m still blogging directly though – but I’ll have to look into setting up an SSL host for this sort of thing.

26Unless you’re on a budget, it’s pretty neat to have Internet on board an airplane. I think I am getting used to it pretty quickly… hopefully, other airlines will offer comparable solutions.

Finally, as an aside: If you book Business Class, you even get a power socket for your notebook. This isn’t available in Economy, however.