节目资讯
刊物:科技前沿
日期:2009-01-14
难易度:High
关键字:lore, Voice over Internet Protocol, broadband, pav


























00:00
















12:14





















Advanced Studio Claasroom is on the air.
It’s time for Advanced, your window on the world.
And we’re going to see the window on the world in flight today.
So fasten your seatbelts, everybody. It’s time to take off.
Oh, no. It’s time to start our program.
And this is Doris Brougham, (Chinese), welcoming you to ”In-Flight Internet
Takes Off,” a TECHNOLOGY article.
Thanks for coming, everybody. How are you today?
I’m great.
I’m doing great, Doris.
Hi, everyone, I’m happy to be here. we’re talking about in-flight Internet,
something that a lot of people never dreamed would happen.
Well, Steve, it’s very nice to have you in our Advanced class.
I know you’re usually on the regular Studio Classroom, but thanks for coming.
Did you fly over here to be in this program?
Well, in one sense I did. I ran here as fast as I could, so you could say I flew
here.
OK. And also we have Howie with us.
Howie’s our technical man on the classroom and also our good panelist. Thanks
for coming, Howie.
Hello, Doris.
And, yeah, we’re talking about Internet on airplanes and... I think it’s about
time.
It’s about time. People have been wondering about this for a while and now they
have it.
So open your magazines to page 24. I hope you all have the magazine.
And look at the drawings, the pictures...
Oh, you’re missing out a lot if you don’t have a magazine, aren’t you? Steve.
You certainly are. We have a lot of good pictures; we have some explanations
there in the box above.
So if you have your magazine, it’d be really helpful.
Grab it and and turn to page 24.
Well, you know what, people like to know what they’re going to learn, and what
they did learn.
So this year we’ll try to give you some tips about what we’re going to learn
today.
And I’m gonna ask Howie to tell us a little bit about what we planned to talk
about today in a nutshell - briefly.
In a nutshell, we’re going to talk about how travelers can enjoy browsing the
web on airplanes now,
something that they weren’t able to do before but now they can enjoy that online
access on their seat.
Well, I know you’ve been on lots of planes as Steve has.
I think almost everybody nowadays goes on planes.
And I think it’s a very important subject, don’t you, Steve?
I certainly do. And as you said, Doris, people flying on planes have grown, the
number has grown over the years.
And this has been a very, very controversial topic for number of reasons,
and I hope that we can touch on those reasons throughout the course of this
lessson.
And I’m going to find out what Steve thinks later, but I’m not gonna ask you
yet, Steve.
I wanna do the lesson first, OK?
Mmhm.
And you, too, Howie, right?
Oh, yes.
Well, it says here that ”In-flight Internet Takes Off.”.
I can see a plane taking off here, but what about the words ”take off,” ”takes
off”?
Yeah, it’s a play on words.
In other words, it’s a pun, P-U-N. A play on words: ”planes take off.”.
But if something takes off, um... like a product, we say it becomes very, very
popular and a lot of people want to buy it.
So that means then it really becomes popular; it gets going; it’s really
starting out.
That’s right.
And so the popularity of in-flight Internet had a hard time getting off the
ground as we said before.
But once it did, boy, is it climbing higher and higher!
And travelers, at least most travelers, can now enjoy Internet access as they
fly the skies.
I’m not sure. Let’s find out.
Should we do some reading first, Howie?
Well, definitely. Who’s gonna read for us today?
Well, let’s find out.
Let’s have the reading today from line one through line 15.
Listen in and see if you know who it is.
In-flight Internet Takes Off.
Travelers can now enjoy Internet access as they fly the skies.
According to official lore at Illinois-based Aircell,
the company’s founder first sketched his own idea for an airplane telephone
system on a napkin while sitting in a Texas barbecue restaurant in 1991.
In August, Aircell chief executive Jack Blumenstein sat in a terminal at John F.
Kennedy (JFK) International Airport,
monitoring several American Airlines flights equipped not with in-flight
telephones, but broadband Internet access.
The company built the Wi-Fi systems for American, which recently launched
Internet service onboard the carrier’s 15 Boeing 767-200 aircraft.
According to the official lore, does that mean folklore or what?
Well, according to the magazinist’s traditional knowledge and stories about a
subject, and it may or may not be confirmable.
We don’t know if it’s actually true or not.
Maybe we could say it was transmitted by word of mouth.
OK, so according to what we have heard then, Aircell, the company’s founder
first sketched his own idea for this telephone system in 1991.
Where was he when he did that? In his office?
No. He was having a meal at a barbecue restaurant in Texas and he was scribbling
on his napkin.
Sounds like Texas.
They’re always having barbecues in Texas, aren’t they?
Oh, Texas barbecue is delicious.
Hmm, don’t get me started on that, Steve.
But you know, have you ever done that? Those sketch things? Or you’re talking
about work and you get the napkin out...
Absolutely. And I think a lot of people have done this more than we know.
People have had an idea, uh...
Even song lyrics.
A lot of famous songs were written first on napkins or menus from a restaurant.
You know, if you’re gonna have a restaurant, you wanna have famous people go
there, be sure and get napkins they can write on, right?
That’s right.
People like to do that.
But anayway, he started sketching this - he was probably talking about it with
his friends - and he started thinking about this.
I don’t think he’s the only one who ever thought of it.
Do you think so, Howie?
No. If you’re a business person and you’re flying back and forth across the
country or internationally,
you’re gonna want to talk on the phone; you’re gonna want to browse on the web.
So I’m sure this idea has come and gone many times.
Mmhm. Well, you know, they’ve had telephones on airlines.
Have you ever used one of those telephones to call people on the land?
I have never dared even take one out, fearing how much they would cost if I used
even one minute.
I don’t know the price, but I know even back then it was very, very expensive to
even take one out and use it.
I remember one time I did it. I can’t remember where it was, near Chicago or
something.
And the plane was coming in four hours earlier or later or something, and I
thought, ”Nobody’ll be there to meet me.”.
So I just used that phone and called somebody.
I don’t remember when the bill came, how much it was, Steve.
But anyway, sometimes, you know, you need to let somebody know you’re going to
be there, please meet you,
and they didn’t know it ahead of time, so you could do that.
But I wouldn’t call them up and just talk to them for the fun of it.
Right, right. Only for emergencies.
Emergencies, right.
But it says here that... that this fellow, Aircell chief executive Jack
Blumenstein, he was in a terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport.
That’s in New York, right?
Mmhm.
And he was monitoring American Airlines flights equipped not with flight phones,
but broadband Internet access.
Now, telephones have been on planes for quite a while.
That’s right.
I’ve actually used on before, and most of the time now you swipe your credit
card and then you can dial internationally or wherever you want.
Was it expensive?
It is. I think when I called, I talked for only... not even one minute.
It was just to let someone know something, and it was like eight American
dollars. It was ridiculous.
Yeah.
That’s what, well, I thought it might be.
It’s pretty high.
All right. Those phones are called in-flight telephones.
Mmhm.
And the, um, this man, Mr. Blumenstein, wasn’t concerned about those.
He was concerned about something else - broadband Internet access.
So, here was the originator of this particular broadband Internet access system
and he was watching to see if it was working well.
And they actually did something about it, didn’t they?
That’s right.
Um, now the company built the Wi-Fi systems for American Airlines,
which recently launched Internet service aboard the carrier’s 15 Boeing
aircrafts.
Well, originally, as I said at the beginning of this program, this has been very
controversial for safety reasons.
A lot of people thought that people talking on the phone while they’re on a
plane,
those signals would interfere with the navigation system of the plane, and so
that would jeopardize people’s safety.
Now people are saying that we have technology to overcome those problems. Now
we’re just starting to test it out.
And this company, American Airlines, has put it in 15 of their planes and
they’re seeing if there’s any glitches in the system.
But you know, we all have cell phones, and they always make you turn them off
when you get on a plane.
Is it really not safe or not... uh... Does anybody know?
I think they do it for precautionary reasons. They don’t want any kind of signal
to interfere with the navigational controls.
And I think another reason why they ask you to turn off your cell phones is
because if everyone was allowed to use it,
you would have people talking on the phone on the airplane, and it’d be very,
very noisy.
There are stories where pilots would come out of the cockpit, um, because they
have heard interference on their headphones.
And they claimed that people were on their cell phones when they shouldn’t have
been, and they detected that.
And so it does cause a problem.
But again, there’s new technology now where they can override that.
And you can now, hopefully, safely go on the Internet on the plane without any
problem.
That probably can’t be the regular phones that we use now...
Maybe it has to be something different, right?
Well, I think it would be the same kinds of phones.
It’s the technology that they put in the plane, um, to help that.
Another interesting argument back then was that the phones in the plane would
actually interfere with land lines,
because the signals going from the phone to the earth would interfere with
people’s signal while they’re on, uh, a train or in their car, for examples.
That was another concern, but apparently they overcame those problems.
I still can’t listen to a phone while I’m going through a tunnel sometimes on a
train.
But, you know, there are certain things that the communications just don’t work,
you know.
Well, this is saying then that people have had this idea, and they have had
telephones.
We didn’t use them very much; they were expensive.
But now, to have what we called broadband, not dial-up where you have to use a
phone,
but the Wi-Fi, the broadband Internet, that you can do it on planes, and you’re
allowed to do it.
That is pretty new.
You’re right. It is new. It’s...
And that’s why we’re presenting this article to our friends and listeners
because we want them to be aware of how new it is.
But, Doris, I should call everyone’s attention to the fact that this isn’t so
new in Europe and in the Middle East.
This was occurring a year or two ago.
People and the governments already gave the green light for this to happen.
This is more in relation to the United States.
Sometimes America’s a little more cautious on some of those things, right?
That’s right.
Well, by the way, that was Brian who read it.
Thank you, Brian. You did a good job.
And I’m gonna ask Brain if he’ll read about ”Paving the way,” so we can find out
a little bit more about this.
So, Brian,read on.