Boeing Uses Potatoes as Human Substitutes to Test Wi-Fi
Because everything in the world needs to have a dumb clever acronym behind it, the program to test Wi-Fi signals on planes using potatoes is called Synthetic Personnel Using Dielectric Substitution, or SPUDS. We’ll tolerate the ridiculous name if it makes the Internet go faster.
The reason potatoes are being used as substitutes in the testing is that they interact with radio signals in a very similar way to humans. Instead of Boeing paying people to basically sit and do nothing in an airplane while they test signal strength, they can just buy a lot of potatoes to do the job instead. Plus, at the end of the day, instead of dealing with grumpy people who have been sitting on an airplane all day, you can just eat a bunch of potatoes.
Potatoes are delicious. People are not. Probably.
To simulate a plane full of people, Boeing uses 20,000 lbs of potatoes. They’ve even released a video outlining the project and showing off what a plane full of potatoes looks like.
Hopefully this testing leads to faster in-flight Wi-Fi soon, and if it extends to getting Wi-Fi that works at all on the bus I take to work every morning, well that’d be pretty swell too.
(via Los Angeles Times, image via martinpickard)
- Jet Blue wants to introduce free Wi-Fi in 2013
- Researchers already boosted Wi-Fi signal strength 700%
- NYC will convert payphones to hotspots
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