"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...
Seriously? Is it an aircraft or a video game?

Yeah, I'm very serious... In fact, it cuts down on the wiring... Think of
multiple control stations aboard an aircraft being able to control various
pieces of hardware... With the typical analog controls like you have for
lights in your house, you would be running 110VAC all over everywhere...
With this sort of system, you run power to the actual device and use lower
gauge wires for sending signals to the controller for that device... Think
of it as every device that you want to possibly control having a particular
IP address and port number... You format a command and send it to the
device... Perhaps this one controller handles multiple physical devices and
the format of the message indicates which device is to be controlled or
queried with respect to its current status... Would you rather hligh voltage
running all around the aircraft or just where it was really needed and
basically the equivalent of phone (i.e. CAT-5/6) wire running everywhere
else? In addition to this, the controls for the cabin entertainment system
also were TCP/IP based... Even the video and audio that was piped throughout
the cabin went over a TCP/IP connection -- UDP, actually...

And people think I'm being extreme in suggesting FM radio instead of
AM radio?

Well, that's because FM doesn't provide any real benefit as compared to AM
for aircraft communications... As I've shown in the above aircraft, using
TCP/IP for communication / control of various devices aboard an aircraft can
definitely provide a certain benefit...

A patent on TCP/IP? Would anyone really want to steal something based
on TCP/IP?

No, a patent on the idea of using TCP/IP for communication between various
systems aboard an aircraft... Or maybe it's a copywrite... Whatever...