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Americans To FCC Chair: No Cell Calls On Planes, Please
jfruh writes "Who says Americans are politically apathetic? The FCC's proposal to allow cellular data — and, if the airline allows it, voice calls — on airplanes unleashed a flood of responses even before the official comment period began this week. The sentiment was overwhelmingly opposed to people talking on phones in flight. Some correspondents spun terrifying hypotheticals about yapping teens, some accused FCC chair Tom Wheeler of flying on private planes and being out of touch with the full-on horror of in-flight chatter, and one person concluded their letter with the word 'no' with letter 'o' repeated 213 times."
Allow cell phone calls on airplanes, but only from inside a soundproof booth in the back of the plane.
Technoli
While I find the idea of being trapped next to someone making a phone call on a plane loathsome, the FCC really shouldn't be in the position of banning things just because they're annoying. If there's no technical/safety reason to ban the calls, allow them. The AIRLINES, on the other hand, really SHOULD ban these calls, and most have already said that they would.
Allow people to make phone calls while in-flight... However, they should be asked to step outside for the duration of their phone call.
I would much prefer that people be allowed to talk on their phones. Then I do not have to have them chatting me up while I am trying to read or enjoy some music.
It's really that big a problem? Kinda like the relaxation of pocketknives rule? With respect to anyone so offended, it ain't a movie theater. Shut up, buy some earplugs, and deal.
People are running for a government solution when there isn't even a problem yet? And you wonder how they feel that warrentless wiretapping and text scanning isn't seen as a problem by these same kinds of people?
I personally don't want to see it either but another peice of legislation isn't the required route for this.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
A night flight. The plane is quiet.
Suddenly,
"Yeah, I couldn't sleep... No, they've fed us.... HA HA HA HA HA!!! Yeah, that's right! HA HA HA HA HA!!! I know what you mean and there's that.... HA HA HA HA HA!!!! Do you remember that?... HA HA HA HA HA!!!"
Summation 2
Imagine your boss calling you in the middle of a three-hour flight....
I seriously wonder why this debate continues. I've left my phone on and tried to use it during flight. I can't get a signal. Period. This entire debate is superfluous unless the airlines want to put microcells on the places and charge an arm and a leg for it like they used to for the in seat phones. If the call is that important, they can pay the $5 a minute to make the call.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is worse than apathy.
Americans are now wholly incapable of thinking for themselves. Instead of insisting that airlines provide the service they want, and voting with their money, they want to tell the government to force everyone to go along with those who shout the loudest. If there's no safety issue with cell phones, is it even the government's business? Most airlines will ban phone usage, except perhaps in business class or wherever else warranted. Some won't, and for those who can't cut the (totally nonexistent) cord they'll choose those airlines.
I find it hypocritical that anyone who believes in personal liberties should support the government regulating behavior they find annoying.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The sad thing is, there are people in this office that would have printed and counted by hand :(
All I asked for were sharks with freaking laser beams attached to their heads!
They are mutated sea bass.
Are they ill-tempered?
Very.
Who really wins if the FAA/FCC ban inflight cell coverage? The airlines that have built a pay service for internet connections. If we allow cellular coverage in the air, they lose a revenue stream. The airlines already have processes in place for annoying passengers. If you are really annoyed by the person next to you they don't need new rules to deal with yapping on a cell phone. On the other hand, I would enjoy being able to read news while traveling. I would enjoy getting work done with reference materials available while traveling. Please don't knee jerk away a gain for consumers.
Many cellphones - even if in airplane mode - still allow the GPS antenna to be used. You won't be able to download maps while in airplane mode, but if you are just using a simple app like "GPSTest" (which displays coordinates/speed), it works just fine.
I would be fine with SMS texting only. But allowing people to talk on their phone, would be a huge discomfort to passengers. The problem is most people (including me) talk louder when on the phone. A little of this falls on the lack of good technology to allow quiet conversations to take place on phone calls. In the end I hope FCC continues the ban of talking on the phone while in flight, but allowing texting.
The silly thing about this debate is that the FCC regulates RF spectrum, and the FAA regulates aviation safety, but the only thing anyone can say about cell phones on airplanes is that people use them in an annoying manner... sometimes. Complain to your airline, friends, business associates, and family... but please do not stand in the way of technology to prevent what you think might be a mild annoyance.
the fcc is not responsible for making laws preventing annoyance... they are responsible for safety. it shouldnt be up to the FCC to ban talking on cell phones, it should be up to the airline to decide whether they want to ban talking or not.
Thankfully I have a shorter commute these days, but my last job involved an hour-and-a-half trip each direction on the train. The thing that bothered me most wasn't the time, the crowded trains, the hours i had to get up in the morning. No, it was the people yapping on their phones. Imagine a 5:50 AM commuter train with totally dead people half-asleep, then some idiot starts screaming into their phone and doesn't shut up for the entire trip. Now imagine that same scenario, but now you're inches away from that idiot crammed into a coach seat for a 14 hour flight to Japan. I fly a fair amount of these incredibly long trips for work, and I think I'd rather poke a hole in my eardrums with a sharp instrument than listen to 14 hours of inane banter or some exec screaming at his subordinate or assistant.
People just don't get that (a) you don't need to shout anymore, and (b) no one wants to hear about the divorce case you're working on, the colon polyp you had removed, your escapades out at the bar last night, your cat, your dog, your kids or any of the large number of conversations I've heard.
The other thing that's nice for the truly crazy business people I know (I'm not one of them) is that airplane time is dead time -- no one is sending you messages, no one can reach you, etc.
Damn straight. "I only like some of the offerings on the market, not all of them" is a "you problem," not a government problem.
I remember when the same kind of nanny state shit happened with smoking in bars, in my city. Some bars prohibited smoking. Some bars allowed it. It was perfect: Everyone was happy and could drink at (or work at, or own) exactly the kind of place they wanted. Everyone wins. If you wanted to smoke, you could. If you didn't want to breathe someone else's toxic exhaust, you didn't have to. Everyone was happy except the Nazis, that is, who wanted to go to smoking-allowed bars and have there not be smoke there. So now all the bars in my town are non-smoking, not because that's what the customers or the owners or the staff wanted wanted, but because that's what the voters' representatives wanted. Ridiculous.
Airlines that want to have a "no sanity-shattering cocophany" can attract the customers who value that. Airlines that want to have a "sure, spend the flight yapping about bullshit" service can attract the customers who value that. Everyone wins and no customers will ever have any reason to complain about anything, if we go that way.
So: what the fuck, my fellow Americans? Is this land of the free, or not? What kind of country do you want to live in? You people sure like to bitch about losing freedoms, but you constantly advocate against freedom too, and keep re-electing Republicrats. STOP BEING SO PSYCHO!!
and i don't find them the least bit annoying.
i think it would be very similar for airplanes.
I've never tried to make a call but I have happily sent texts during a flight before. I can't say I paid much attention to it at the time, but I'm pretty sure I had a good bar or two of reception, at least whilst over land, so I'm guessing a call could have worked ok too. I'm sure the sitting-in-a-metal-tube thing won't help but presumably the windows allow enough RF to pass through.
Also, some of the passengers of 'flight 93' made calls to their loved ones during the 9/11 hijackings.
one person concluded their letter with the word 'no' with letter 'o' repeated 213 times.
Ah. The voice of reason.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Airlines have had wired phones on seat backs for years without any problems or public outcry. The only difference between them and cell phones are that the users don't have to pay the airline to use their cell phones.
Sure it's annoying to have the person next to you yacking on a cell phone, but it's also annoying to have them snoring, talking loudly, crying, etc.
We need to stop making a big deal out of the fact the we're annoyed and appreciate the fact that we can travel thousands of miles without anybody die from scurvy, malnutrition, or attacks from unfriendly people or wild animals.
Philosophically speaking, it doesn't make sense to ban people talking on the phone and not ban people talking to the person next to them. I've never heard anyone asking the FCC (or slightly more reasonably the FAA) to regulate the volume people can speak on the plane.
Practically speaking, people tend to speak more loudly when they are speaking on the phone. Normally, this is not necessary. Part of the problem is that unlike landlines (remember them?), you don't get the feedback in the earpiece of your own voice when you're speaking on a mobile phone. Psychologically, this creates a desire to "speak up". This could be helped immensely big changing the way the hardware works.
You could also require the use of some sort of external headset that provides feedback and eliminates background noise better than the existing phones.
Most importantly, educating people that they don't need to speak that loudly into mobile phones could go a long way. And not only on airplanes.
Cellphones on plane would be annoying, but as long as it's not dangerous, that's purely a business problem. The FCC shouldn't be getting involved with enforcing various people's aesthetics on others; that's not it's job.
I like that person.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
About how many signed the petition to the FCC to implement Common Carrier status on ISPs.
With many airlines now offering Wifi on board people will sidestep the any phone ruling. A skype call on your laptop using a headset is exactly the same as a phone call but without all the cellular issues.
Make those drop-down oxygen masks a little bigger, and they can double as CONES OF SILENCE. These will work especially well with the rumored iShoe phone
...where Schwarzenegger kills that guy sitting next to him on the plane. That would be me. And I don't want to go to prison. I would only fly on airlines that prohibit it. But based on the disdain they show for they customers, I'm sure they all would allow it.
Look, I don't like the idea of people yapping away next to me on a plane but it's just not the FCC's job to regulate annoyance. Their job in this context is to ensure safety, if cellphones are safe to use on planes then from an FCC perspective they should be allowed. The airlines on the other hand are a whole different ball of wax and should implement strong rules to preserve the customer experience.
On the bus, the driver has to listen to the same chatter the passengers do. If a passenger is too annoying they'll just pull over and wait for them to get off the phone. At this point even the apathetic passengers will "help" enforce the social contract...
The biggest gripe about phone users is that they speak more loudly than people conversing in person. This is due to inherently poor connection quality. Why is it that cellphone technology still limits voice bandwidth to just a few KHz? It's insane that voice quality hasn't tracked technology improvements over the years. The way to get people to speak more quietly on phones is to: a) Improve voice quality to reliable VOIP-levels (or just use VOIP to begin with, already available on most smartphones) b) Employ background noise rejection at the source (already available on most smartphones) Even after (a) and (b), people will probably speak loudly out of habit. So, (c), echoing the speaker's voice, robustly-amplified, in his/her earpiece may be needed as a reminder to speak quietly. Plane passengers speak to each other in person all the time. And quite loudly, too, to be heard over engine noise. Properly leveraging technology could make it so that cellphone talkers on planes would be MUCH quieter than these in-person conversationalists. If only the industry would actually bother applying this technology to the important-but-less-glamorous aspects of smartphones, namely, voice.
International flights would probably still be mostly silent, for quite a few reasons:
1. The attendants enforce closing the window shade and limited conversation to help passengers sleep, this would be no different.
2. International roaming charges for every country who's tower you've connected to (not to mention the massive battery drain in an environment with limited charging options)
3. The FCC has no say in the matter once you're out of the US anyway, until all the countries follow the same rules they still need to be most restrictive...
I remember the first few times I flew out to the U.S., and almost all of the seats actually had phones in the headrest of the chair in front (where later they would put some nice monitors for in-flight entertainment, or nothing at all if you fly cheap). The only barrier to using them was that you'd need to slide a credit card through a slot and pay up the wazoo to use them. Even so, there were sure to be plenty of busy business people aboard, and they didn't use them either.
As it is, the only instance that I recall even seeing them used is on two movies: Red Eye, and Inception.
Though I agree that airlines should probably ban their use unless on the ground, just making it stupendously expensive to use them (and I see no technical reason they couldn't - just call it roaming charges) seems like a pretty good deterrent.
Hearing half a conversation can be very distracting, it's how we're wired.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Imaging not picking up. Wow what a concept.
But isn't this all moot? Unless you are using a satellite phone how exactly is a cell phone supposed to get a signal within a flying plane? I am no expert, but isn't the signals transmitted by ground based stations? I am not sure that they A) have the range, or B) are omni-directional (i.e up). Perhaps at low altitude close to a tower, or on the runway, but I am not sure how well cell technology is going to operate at 30,000ft over nothing.
http://www.911myths.com/html/mobiles_at_altitude.html
Seems to indicate that it may be possible, but likely not, and even if it was, impractical.
Wifi is an interesting idea, as it could be used for connectivity. Then again the connection that is used is a satellite one, which likely has some bandwidth restrictions, and is likely costly to operate beyond a certain point.
So for the most part this is a moot argument in the first place.
Well, I've been on city buses and seen all of the annoying behavior happen lots of times.
I was in a store today, and someone was talking loudly on their bluetooth headset quite loudly the whole time I was in the line at the cash.
Locked in an airplane with some inconsiderate idiot who insists on yammering away on his phone the entire time ... no bloody way.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
anybody else amused by the incremental error of changing 212 FTA to 213 for no apparent reason?
The FCC's role in all of this should be is there a safety reason not to allow the phones on planes. The fact that it will be annoying and obnoxious should be left up to the market to decide. If some airlines offer cell free flights, and the public wants that, then those airlines will profit by increased ridership. If not, then their competitors will benefit. Not every problem needs to be solved by the government.
This is the government. They hired a subcontractor to write an application to count them. It was to within two significant figures by version 3.0.
I wouldn't feel comfortable bring one on a plane though, for safety issues.
Really, wtf is wrong with people? The FCC's job is not to determine if cell phones annoy you. It is to determine their safety.
If you don't want people talking on cell phones then talk to the airlines or in the worse case, still lame and stupid, Congress to pass a law.
The low level of basic civics knowledge in this country is astounding.
The FCC asserts, on the one hand, that it “is considering whether advances in technology no longer warrant – on a technological basis – the prohibition of in-flight mobile phone use. This is purely a technical decision.” (FAQ: What has the FCC proposed?) And yet in the NPRM the Commission makes a sweeping and non-technical assertion that “we find that it is in the public interest to bring the benefits of mobile communications services on aircraft to domestic consumers.” (79 FR 2616) The FCC cannot make such a finding; the public interest in this issue goes far beyond the technical considerations for which it has expertise. And indeed the Commission has not actually made a true finding of the public interest, nor even attempted to do so. The Commission has repeatedly and expressly absolved itself of the responsibility of weighing, or even considering, the costs to the traveling public of cellphone use on aircraft. And while it makes passing reference to “public safety” and “law enforcement” (79 FR 2626) its use of these terms does not include concern for the safety of passengers from emotional disruption, confrontation and potential violence on board aircraft, or of the law enforcement responsibilities of aircraft crew in such circumstances. If the FCC must remove a technical barrier to cellphone use, so be it, but it should not purport to have made a public interest value judgment upon such use.
Well, you have to admire the restraint, but I think this calls for a more forceful protest.
If the issue is having to listen to phone conversations on a plane, then when are the airlines removing all the phones on the backs of the seats?
Getting up in arms about cell phones on planes is all fine and good. Frankly, however, I'd rather see people be getting upset about the net neutrality ruling and demanding the FCC appeal the outcome. That will have a greater long term impact than conversations on planes.
I like the announcement on the Tokyo bus to the city.
"Do not use mobile phones as they annoy the neighbors"
They also had seatbelts.
So civilized....
The arguments against phone calls on planes seem to be mostly about the irritation factor of phone calls.
That is not a safety concern and therefore is not something the federal government needs to regulate.
NOTE just because the federal government says something is legal on a plane doesn't mean the airline needs to allow it.
Which means, the FCC can allow phones on the planes and then the airlines can decide if they're going to allow it themselves.
I agree phone calls would be annoying on a plane. However, I don't think most could credibly complain about texting or screwing around with a tablet.
Seriously, people need to learn the difference between something being bad enough that an establishment should discourage it and being bad enough that the federal government should make it a federal regulation/law.
Talking on a phone while flying while annoying is not worthy of a federal ban on the practice. Anyone advocating otherwise is either an intellectually lazy idiot that doesn't know what he is talking about or they're fascists. Sounds extreme but that's an extreme abuse of federal power for relatively petty purposes.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Yes, cell phones on a plane are a bad idea, but I've been using earplugs since forever and good ones (that seal well) will pretty much drown out everything... loud engine noise, screaming children, etc.
It would also help if the airlines charged a fee to access the cell repeater on the plane like they do with wifi. That might at least keep the most inane conversations from happening. Or not.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
The ban on using mobile phones was NEVER for safety reasons. It was to prevent widespread co-channel intereference between analog cells.
You CAN use a mobile phone perfectly legally in the air - as long as you are under 5000 feet above ground level. The reasoning for that is that an analog mobile phone is unlikely to cause blocking of the channels in use on adjacent cells (Analog systems reuse their channels every 2-3 cells)
Digital TDM systems are far less prone to such interference, so the issue no longer matters (they don't work at all if phones are travelling faster than ~200mph relative to the base station, which already causes trouble on EU high speed trains).
Whilst I can sympathise with submitters not liking the idea of asshats bellowing on their mobiles, that's not within the remit of the FCC. Given that aircraft have to be fitted with mocrocells in most cases it's simply amatter of cabin staff switching voice service OFF (many do at night/quiet periods in jurisdictions where airborne mobiles are allowed). In any case the useage fees will discourage heavy use. They generally run to about $3/minute for airborne use.