Patent ID: 7213055

Claim:
A passenger in-flight entertainment system comprising: airborne server that sources data; first digital network that receives data from the airborne server; cable modem terminator that accepts data from the server by way of the first digital network and modulates a carrier signal according to the data; radio frequency distribution subsystem that propagates the carrier signal throughout an aircraft; cable modem that accepts a carrier signal from the radio frequency distribution system and extracts digital data therefrom; secondary digital network that accepts digital data from the cable modem that was extracted from the carrier signal by said cable modem, and a network address translator that accepts network requests from the cable modem terminator and conforms said request to the address scheme of the first digital network, the network address translator comprising: user registration unit that accepts registration requests from passenger personal electronic devices and maintains a list of personal electronic devices that have registered for off-aircraft services and creates routine directives for each network request received from the cable modem terminator; and address translation unit that accepts routing directives from the user registration unit and translates the address of network requests in order to direct the request to the airborne server if the routing directive indicates that the personal electronic device sourcing the network request has not registered for off-aircraft services and direct the network request to a communications unit if the routing directive indicates that the personal electronic device sourcing the network request has registered for off-aircraft services.