AshMan says…

Skype 30,000 feet in the air? Yeah, sure!

AshMan Says…

I’m going on exchange to Slovenia over the Winter holidays to study at the University of Ljubljana. However what surprised me was for a country of just over two million people and a capital city with just a mere three hundred thousand people, the country has one of the largest universities in the world.

University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

One of the big decisions which I had to make was to find a way to get myself from Australia to the little southern European country. After doing a number of searches online and trying a number of different travel dates I had found the dates I wanted to travel on, now all I had to decide was who I wanted to fly. I had worked the options down to two airlines, Singapore Airlines and Emirates Airlines. With having a 28+ hour flight I wanted to make sure that I was going to try provide myself with the best and most comfortable flight (as I also have a history of not sleeping much at all/if any on long haul flights).

Emirates A380

This is where I started to do a little bit of research on what both airlines offered and was surprised to see how far inflight technology has come. I was particularly hoping that Singapore Airlines had improved their inflight entertainment since I last flew them to Europe in 2008/2009.

I discovered that Singapore Airlines has come a little way in updating their entertainment hub with a new remote control and an updated screen, however apart from that things haven’t really changed. What really blew me away was the inflight technology which Emirates offer on their A380’s. Offered is access to wireless internet via WiFi as well as the ability to complete calls and send SMS’s via your GSM Mobile. Unfortunately the A380 is unable to currently land in Brisbane so takes the direct flight option out of the equation for me, though  the 13 inch screen, 1200 channels and the power adapter for laptops are the icing on the cake from what I have heard to be the Emirates Experience from fellow travellers and might just be enough to entice many.

Emirates ICE System

What really got me thinking however was the overall embracing and improvement of technology; and how it enables passengers to use what was once considered a very dangerous device to even have on board with the wireless feature is disabled! What is a huge plus too is that the technology and speed of the wireless service is really good. A friend of mine during State of Origin Game 1 was streaming the game online, and didn’t experience any serious buffering issues, which flying almost 30,000 feet in the air traveling at approximately 900km/h is pretty impressive to me.

Emirates and Wireless a match made in the skies!

Makes me wonder why I still can’t get good 3G speeds when travelling on the bus to work in the city!  Thanks to another technology (that being YouTube) I was able to find a copy of the inflight entertainment system which Emirates has on their planes and I think sums up pretty well just how far that technology has come!  Enjoy the link below!!

And by the way…I made the decision and AshMan is flying Emirates!

Tags: A380, business, Class, Dubai, Economy, Emirates, Entertainment, Exchange, first, GSM, ICE, Inflight, Insight, Ljubljana, mobile, QUT, Singapore Airlines, Slovenia, university, Video, wireless