A more apt analogy that's come up in the past is pharmaceutical and biomedical companies that decide their products cannot legally be used for administering lethal injection. In this analogy declaring these companies a supply chain risk would prevent any of their products being used by any companies that do business with the US Government. This includes major companies such as Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, so it would be a huge impact.

Specific terms are doing some heavy lifting in the article. Cover the globe with 90 satellites doesn't mean be able to provide service to the globe (from a look angle perspective, let alone from a regulatory perspective, or having the power for all beams to be on all the time, etc.). Similarly, launching up to 60 before the end of the year is not a commitment to launching any at all this year - it just means they won't launch more than that.

Well, that's if they sell the geodata associated with the game, which isn't a guarantee. I assume part of this is intended to help Niantic pivot more into trying to develop their "Large Geospatial Model (LGM)" that they've been collecting data on for a long time. Look at Harry Potter Wizards Unite for a model where one company (Warner Bros) was responsible for the game that was utilizing APIs and licensing data provided on the back-end by Niantic. It's possible that ownership of geolocation data stays in Niantic's hands. I'm not trying to convince anyone that it will stay in Niantic's hands, just pointing out that it might and we don't have information about whether that ownership would follow the games or stay with Niantic.

You claim that you've been playing almost since the start and walked almost 6,000km but you're level 16? I call BS on that. I have a friend that played for like a day shortly after it came out, a day in Hawaii last year, and like 2 days this week. With about 25km walked, 200-250 Pokemon caught, and 100 Pokestops visited she's level 20.

There are a few providers: GoGo - Delta, American, United P.S. routes, Alaska, most Virgin America Row44 / Global Eagle - Southwest Panasonic - most international ones, half of United Viasat - JetBlue, half of United, some Virgin America Some service vendors use the same hardware and spectrum suppliers, some don't.

Gogo's satellite based system won't go live until "second half of 2014" Source. Their system is currently only air-to-ground (they actually call it ATG).

There are airlines that charge you for each carry-on that you have. I know Spirit Airlines does this, and I've heard that there are others but I'm not sure which.

I think I've seen sub 600ms, but on the order of 800ms may be more typical? Maybe around a second? I was on flights a few months back so I don't remember the numbers offhand. Coming from a cable connection at home I expected to find the lag to be a bit more bothersome than it was, but that could be a function of my activities (with video/audio streaming, the delay doesn't matter as much). Geo satellites are 22,000 mi up, so that's 500+ms of travel time. Which actually makes 600ms seem less realistic, so maybe that wasn't a real number. Sorry for a rambling response that doesn't really answer the question.

Full disclosure: I work for the company that JetBlue is partnered with to provide the satellite link, and I work on this project specifically.

There was a media flight yesterday morning that had a bunch of aviation press on it, all trying to push the system to its limits. Here's what one blogger had to say: "Speedtests proved that the WiFi remained fast, registering between 12-28 Mbps, even with over 60 devices connected and pushing activities like Netflix Instant, Google Video Hangouts, Ustream live streaming, and Skype calls." Engadget also has more details about the media flight.

There are obviously a lot of posts about the service, but out of the ~10 that I read those had the most details about Wednesday morning's actual flight.