More Military-Civilian Technology Fisticuffs

ROBE versus Connexion By Boeing


THE VERDICT: Civilian Connexion by Boeing. Too many planes, too many outdated but interconnected systems-military fliers will be lucky to have high-speed wireless access by 2008.

On May 18 at 3:18 a.m., on board Lufthansa flight 452 from Munich to Los Angeles, Boeing executive David Friedman sent an e-mail. "Hello from 33,000 feet above Germany," he wrote. Alexander Graham Bell to Watson it wasn't, but the message nonetheless marked a milestone: the official commercial debut of wireless Internet access for airline passengers. In addition to Lufthansa, several Asian airlines have committed to the system; American, Delta and United may sign on for 2005. Getting online is easy: Fire up your WiFi-equipped laptop and pay $15 to $30, depending on flight length. Then, at a speed somewhere between dial-up and DSL, you're free to sky-surf the Web-or download videos, or log onto your company intranet, or draft Doug Christie for your fantasy basketball team. And a long, strange trip it will be for Doug: from laptop to plane server to one of nine satellites; to a ground station in Colorado, Switzerland, Russia or Japan; through terrestrial networks to the fantasy server-and back.

The Air Force also is researching a wireless, IP-based system. It's called the Airborne Network, and it will operational in 2008 or so. Maybe. Currently, for fighter pilots to communicate electronically, they must be in line-of-sight distance (around 300 miles). A network of terrestrial and satellite relays-known as the Joint Range Extension-can provide more reach, but installing ground stations in enemy territory is dicey. Cutting-edge for the Air Force, then, is ROBE, or Smart Tanker, in which the ground relays move to massive KC-135 airborne tankers. ROBE is substantially slower than Connexion and IP-illiterate, which isolates it from the world of modern computing. Air Force engineers defend the system. It is proven and effective, and upgrades are arduous in a fleet of 5,000 planes with highly integrated avionics systems. "To change one person requires changes on the part of everybody else," says Darrell Trasko, chief engineer at the USAF Electronic Systems Center. The eventual switch will be Atari-to-Xbox-huge-some wide-body airplanes still have IBM 360 mainframes, cutting-edge tech from 1964.

The Vitals: ROBE

Purpose: To collect tactical information from planes and create a "God's eye" view of the battle space

Special capabilities: Antijamming technology-messages bounce among 51 different frequencies

Speed: Network data rates of 2.4 to 115 kb per minute

Cost: $30 million

The Vitals: Connexion by Boeing

Purpose: To let passengers work and play while they fly

Speed: Network rate of 1 to 20 mbps

Special capabilities: TCP/IP "spoofing" to correct for long data-transmission times

Cost: $1 billion invested to date