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Cell Phones To Be Allowed On UK Planes
Matty the Monkey writes "The British regulator in charge of air travel has approved cellphones for use on airline flights, reports the BBC. Airlines will be allowed to activate base stations in the plane's tail after takeoff, creating a zone of mobile coverage around the plane. 'The services could stop working once aircraft leave European airspace. Initially, only second generation networks will be offered but growing interest would mean that third generation, or 3G, services would follow later, said Ofcom. The cost of making a mobile phone call from a plane will be higher than making one from the ground.'"
Ok, troll feeding, but apparently you didn't even bother reading your own link.
A. All but TWO of the calls came from cell phones. The rest were from Verizon Airfones that are mounted to the back of the middle seat that charge like $20/sec. (But ya know, if you're being hijacked, you make the damn call, charges be damned)
B. The plane was about 2,500 feet off the ground when the cell phones were able to connect and then were dropped shortly after as the plane, well, crashed. Abridging the last paragraph in the LINK YOU BLOODY GAVE.
So...yeah. Make a cell call from 30,000 feet and get back to us.
I have the nice Bose headsets and while, yes... they do cancel out engine noise nicely, they are so well engineered that you can very easily hear voices and conversations sitting next to you or on the overhead PA. Believe me, I have elite frequent flyer status and fly enough to know that this policy is going to cause problems.
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Yes, dammit, cellphones will work from an airplane. That is not the problem.
When your phone connects to a terminal, both the phone and the terminal measure the strength of each other's signal and they adjust their transmitting power to give a usable signal. That's why your battery charge doesn't last as long out in the country: your phone is transmitting at full power.
When you're at high altitude in an airplane, your phone will connect to a terminal that might be fifty or a hundred miles away, it will use full power to do that, and it will hit every other cell tower within that range. That loads the system down.
The system described in TFA puts a terminal right in the airplane, where your phone can communicate with it at minimum power. Then the signal goes over a reserved channel from the airplane to a dedicated ground terminal and into the main cell system, without fscking up everybody else on the same channel as your phone.
rj
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