RFC1149: Ten Years of In-Flight Internet

It's been ten years since a small group of Bergen hackers implemented RFC1149, the Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol, making in-flight Internet a reality well ahead of any airline.

On April 28th, 2001, my laptop received four ping packets. That in itself, you might say, was not a particularly noteworthy event.

However, on this occasion, the message was in the medium. The traffic my laptop received that day was transmitted via avian carriers, more commonly known as carrier pigeons.

The story of the hows and whys was rather quickly documented in main implementer Vegard Engen's "preliminary writeup" (part of the CPIP Workgroup website (which was slashdotted and for a few days saw traffic in the million hits per day range).

Why did we do it? Because the RFC was implementable, and it was fun. Very few people outside tech circles have ever clued in on this, with a few notable exceptions such as Peter Meyers, who wrote the salon.com article The pigeon protocol that was published within a few days of the event.

If you're interested in this kind of thing (if you're still reading, I suppose you are), other writeups such as my own The kernel hacker speaks to polite people and assists in the flight of network packets - a conspirator's view of Alan Cox' April 2001 Bergen visit may be worth reading too.

After the event, Vegard made a presentation about the workgroup efforts at the next IETF conference, and was presented with a plaque (jpg, 76kB, jpg, 2.1MB) in return.

The CPIP WG activities have proceeded at a more leisurely pace in recent years. In 2005 I went to the AUUG 2005 conference to do an early version of the PF tutorial, and en route I made a presentation in Adelaide about the project (slides and accompanying notes are still avaliable).

We're still looking for independent, interoperable implementations, though. Preferably on other free operating systems besides Linux. If we can entice our old pigeon partners to participate, we're more than willing to arrange for interoperability tests.

The world needs this to be on the IETF Standards Track.