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Andy Abramson wrote an interesting blog post about Aircell, the new WiFi broadband internet service provided by American Airlines.

The point is that not all the applications over internet are allowed on that service and VoIP is one of them. Andy tried SightSpeed but the call was dropped after 10 seconds only, same story with Skype. I bet all other SIP-based services are blocked as well.

Andy then tried to use a service based on flash and… it worked perfectly. The service mentioned by Andy is Phweet, the TringMe-based VoIP service for any Twitter user (I already posted about Phweet last month) designed by Stuart Henshall and David Beckemeyer.

Andy points out that the interesting story here is about “thinking different”:

…all the attention was given to Skype. Skype and SIP based communications applications. There’s more to VoIP and real time communications out there, and we have to think about the best application for the situation. That’s called reasoning. Logic. Creative thinking. In my world that’s the start of Asymmetrical thinking. Look at a problem differently, and see different solutions that are already there.

In this specific case, Phweet was the solution to this problem. As an engineer, I can’t agree more. While at the University, I’ve been taught to think different if I wanted to quickly get to a solution of a problem and during my working experience I learnt that this is even more true than what I thought.

Good points Andy.

p.s. sometimes things work but you cannot really understand why. Flash VOIP is, actually, SIP based. In this perspective, it should have been blocked as well… I bet the reason is another one, that is how the call is setup on Phweet.

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