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U.S. Airlines to Offer In-Air Wi-Fi
"Within the next year, US Airlines are going to be offering Wi-Fi service onboard flights. VoiP calls will be banned initially, but the article mentions that lifting the ban on cellphones may still be a possibility. 'AirCell will install equipment on airliners that will act as a WiFi hotspot in the cabin and connect to laptop computers and devices like BlackBerrys that have WiFi chips. In all, it will cost about $100,000 to outfit a plane with less than 100 pounds of equipment, and the work can be done overnight by airline maintenance workers, AirCell says. What makes the service particularly attractive to airlines is that they will share revenue with AirCell. The service will cost about the same as existing WiFi offerings. Mr. Blumenstein says it will charge no more than $10 a day to passengers. It will also offer discounted options for customers and tie into existing service programs like T-Mobile, iPass and Boingo. Speeds will be equivalent to WiFi service on the ground.'"
I have a hard time believing that. If a WiMAX connection messed up airline naviagtion, the towers on the ground would be screwing them up whether a device was on the plane or not. Now, I know that they are not a definitive source of info, but the Mythbusters episode where they tried to interfere with an planes instruments with cell phones and other radio equipment, they showed that it is just not going to happen. They had to do some pretty serious work to get the plane's equipment to a state that it could be affected by non-intentional interference. Look at it this way. If you could crash an airplane by hitting it with consumer level radio waves, don't you think we would be seeing a lot more planes going down? Why take a shoe bomb on a plane. Just turn on a battery operated radio transmitter.