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Southwest Airlines Community

Why Fly? Wi-Fi

sheaser
Frequent Flyer B
Did you know that Wi-Fi doesn’t actually stand for anything? Sure it sounds like Hi-Fi which is (was?) short for High Fidelity—as in better sound quality of stereo records over their monaural cousins. But the name “Wi-Fi” was invented by a company called Interbrand. It seems that the founding members of the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, (who were later renamed the Wi-Fi Alliance) hired Interbrand to come up with something better than "IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence" the original name of the technology. Interbrand also created "Prozac", "Compaq" "oneworld", and "Imation" among other company and product names.
 
[asset|aid=355|format=image|formatter=asset|title=UnderRadome.jpg|width=222|height=153|resizable=true|align=right]This episode of Red Belly Radio was recorded on mobile studio N901WN, also known as one of our aircraft. But this aircraft is the first in our fleet with Wi-Fi! A group of Employees along with representatives from the company who developed the equipment, took a test flight recently. Interviews include Angela Vargo from Marketing, Doug Murri from Flight Ops Technologies, and Bill McNary the Vice President Business Development of AeroSat, the company who developed the satellite antenna. The video this week was from the test flight where the podcast was recorded. The photo on the right is of the antenna with the radome cover removed.
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