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FCC to Auction Airwaves for Inflight Internet
maotx writes "The FCC is set to auction off existing licensed frequencies from Verizon on May 10 to provide communication services such as high-speed Internet to U.S. air travelers. Verizon is the current licensee of the range for their onboard phones found on most commercial jets. The auction will force Verizon to use the 1MHz range. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps fears that such an auction could allow a single provider to have a monopoly that could prey on consumers. The FCC is also weighing whether to allow consumers to use their own cell phones on planes."
Unlike now where you have a single provider (Verizon) holding this spectrum that could prey on consumers?
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
... or a misunderstanding. 1 MHz is currently in use by terrestrial AM broadcasters.
Dog is my co-pilot.
i live in a state(oregon) that thinks i'm too stupid to pump my own gas you insensitive clod!
With internet enabled airplanes... VOIP then becomes possible.
Personally, I'd prefer no cell phones on planes at all. Too annoying for everyone else, and man - I'm already reachable everywhere else.
Mark
I for one am against the usage of individual cell phones on flights. There aren't many areas now that you can't hear some idiot talking entirely too loudly about some worthless subject, but at least you can usually walk away from them. What if now that jerk is suddenly ten or twenty jerks yapping all around you in a confined space for several hours?
When do we reach that point when the public is too wired? It's one thing to be a techie and enjoy technology for the pure love of the game. You might pay top dollar to be bleeding edge and capitalize on the next-great-thing, but you have to work at that. There are no free lunches on the edge. But when Joe Consumer has that same power of connectedness, at his simple beck and call without having to "work" for it, don't you think it will get really annoying?
Broadband on a flight would be pretty cool, though.
While where at it auctioning shit that's not even our's for a high price. I will like to auction the radio waves coming from my microwave starting bid is $6,000. Anyone interested please contact me at /dev/null.
Please check out my other items such as radiowaves from my cellphone for sale and my remote control toy hovercraft operating in the elite mhz of 25!
I am verified and please remember to bid with confidence. kthxbye.
The only solution is noise cancelling headphones. Pilots have awfully nice ones, but you can buy acceptable ones for a hundred bucks. My modest ones (Sennheiser PCX-250) block out the whole damned airplane so I can get some rest, listen to tunes, whatever. I leave them on with no audio input at all just to block out the noise while trying to sleep.
When I take them off to go to the lavatory I'm always surprised at how noisy that flying airplane tube really is.
Get noise cancelling headphones.
Except that no study has ever - EVER - been able to reproduce that interference. Boeing even *bought* a passenger's laptop and put it in the same seat, on the same plane, on the same route, and were unable to reproduce the interference.
I'd be willing to believe cell phone interference, but I'm just not buying the CD player thing. Note that those are all anecdotal reports made by non-technical flight crew, along the lines of "Hey, the nav system is screwy! Check the cabin!" "Oh, yes sir, we found a guy with a CD player on and castrated him!" "Hey, the nav system works again!" No consideration is apparently made for the possibility that it was a glitch unrelated to the CDplayer, or to the fact that you can almost always find someone using a PED whether there's an avionics problem or not. Correlation != causality.
OTOH, if the aircraft's avionics are SO susceptible to interference that a CD player's motor (although it's more likely to be the clock for the D/A converter than the motor) 30 feet away on the other side of a metal bulkhead will screw them up, then that's crappy design of the avionics and the goddamned thing's not safe to fly under any circumstances. And yes, I am an EE.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
They can interfere with the Autopilot.
Basically some phones slip away from spec due to poor design, or low quality companents. That is why it is only some phones, sometimes.
Granted, that information is 5 years old, so I have no idea how often it happens with new cell phones.
OTOH, my speakers on my cmopeter make a ticking noise just befor I get a call, or whenever the phone has some initial contact with the tower. I ahve no idea why, but if it is messing up a speakers then it is concievable that it interferes with the 400MHz wiring in a plane.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
it is concievable that it interferes with the 400MHz wiring in a plane
That's 400 Hz, not 400 MHz. All the electrical power in aircraft is at 400 Hz, instead of 60 Hz like in your house. The reason is that the fluorescent light ballasts, transformers inside power hungry avionics gear and other power rectifying equipment can be made smaller and lighter when run at 400 Hz. Ever noticed the slightly sour A flat note that comes from the intercom when the stewardess is giving the pre-flight "use your seat cushion for floatation" speech? That is caused by the same factors that cause the 60 Hz buzz in a guitar amplifier.
The ticking, warbling, or whatever sound you hear in your computer speakers when your cell phone connects or occasionally syncs with the nearest tower when on standby is caused by stray rf energy from your cellphone, and it can conceivably interfere with the avionics of the airplane, especially the fly-by-wire types, but rest assured, the avionics and signal cables connecting the various systems are well shielded, because they have to be hardened against the multi-megawatt electromagnetic pulse of rf energy that comes from lightning strikes in the thunderstorms planes sometimes have to fly in the vicinity of. I don't think the milliwatt or so of stray rf energy from cell phones will do anything, but somebody out there must have done a study to show otherwise...
I remember when I was working at a nuclear power plant, there were certain areas of the plant that were "radio exclusion zones", where the workers had to turn their walkie-talkies off. The reason is that the signals in the control systems could be disturbed by someone keying their mike, causing the reactor to scram (much like the disturbance from a neighbor big into CB radios who has illegal linear amplifiers and can be heard jaw-jacking through your TV, FM radio, washing machine, child's braces, etc.)