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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.'"
Wonderful invention. Buy them by the box.
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Would you mind as much if this was only used for text messages and data plans for in-flight communications using a laptop? What if phones were forced into vibrate mode when they detected the picocell on the plane?
>I once had the displeasure of sitting on a plane on the tarmac for two hours....
It will be much worse when the plane is up and flying. Changes in pressure, plus the engine noise, are going to make hearing the tinny little speaker in mobile (since this is the UK) phones very difficult. And when hearing goes, shouting follows. Joy.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
This is an opportunity! Bose makes that headset that cancels out engine noise pretty effectively. If somebody could make a headset that cancels out idiots on their cellphones, they would make a fortune. I say this jokingly but I am serious. I would buy one in a heartbeat.
This whole problem of people talking loudly on a cell phone is due to a fundamental flaw in cell phone design. In the old-style AT&T wired phones, your voice was fed back to the handset receiver, so you could hear yourself when you're talking.
With cell phones, this doesn't happen, so you feel like you need to speak loud enough to hear yourself. Which is louder than a normal conversation because you're covering one ear.
Why cell phone manufacturers don't feed back your voice to the receiver, I don't know.
The real reason why cell phones are banned on planes has nothing to do with their interference with a planes navigation system. Think about it - if there was even a minimal chance that a cell phone could cause a crash of a commercial jet, no one would be allowed to bring one on board. The FAA has tests and will fail any wire not shielded to withstand such interference.
The real reason is that cell phone networks are based on a 2 dimensional system. Cell towers grant leases based on which tower has the strongest signal from a particular phone. When the user of the phone moves from one tower's coverage to another, the lease is transferred. If a plane full of people flew over a metropolitan area with 150 cell phones negotiating leases, chaos ensues as the system is not designed to support a 3 dimensional model. Newer networks are but the older ones will be problematic. I highly suspect the British trial will have a special base on the plane which will take all the leases so the ground towers will not be affected.
The last reason is annoyance. I actually used Skype on planes from Vancouver to Frankfurt equipped with Boeing's Connexion internet service. While the trial ended, it was clear that using Skype on an overnight commercial flight could cause a great deal of annoyance to passengers wanting to sleep. ON local flights, it might be acceptable for a few sociopaths to talk the entire time thus ensuring their fellow passengers have full details of their personal lives.
I personally think that it will be less than two days before we see a newspaper article about a cleaning crew finding a passenger duct taped to the planes toilet with a cell phone shoved up his hind side.
"Question everything, including this!" - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/