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Transportation Department Proposes Allowing In-Flight Phone Calls (go.com)
Yesterday, France's Le Monde newspaper issued a report, citing documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, that says American and British spies have since 2005 been working on intercepting phone calls and data transfers made from aircraft. Assuming the report is accurate, national security agencies may soon have their hands full if a new proposal by the Department of Transportation becomes official, which would allow each airline to decide whether its passengers will be permitted to make in-flight phone calls using the aircraft's onboard Wi-Fi system. ABC News reports: The Department of Transportation's proposal leaves it up to airlines whether to allow the calls. But carriers would be required to inform passengers at the time they purchase a ticket if the calls are allowed. That would give passengers the opportunity to make other travel arrangements if they don't want to risk the possibility of sitting near passengers making phone calls. The Federal Communications Commission prohibits using mobile phones to make calls during flights, but not Wi-Fi calls. There is a minimum 60-day comment period and the proposal leaves the door open to an outright ban. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the proposal.
Listening to folks yell into their phones passing by or in a restaurant is bad enough, imagine sitting next to one for an eight hour flight. :|
With no way to escape it.
Would almost be worth opening the door and jumping to your death from 30,000 feet. . . .
Air travel is bad enough without noise pollution.
If you're dumb enough to pay for that shitty wifi on flights good luck making a voip call over it. You're lucky to get an email out.
Didn't we go through a bunch of no about this a couple years ago?
In a lipstick tube FTW. OR.... They will have to make cabin separators so they can put all the passengers who want to flap their gums on the cell phone all together and leave normal passengers together so we don't kill them.
Victory is ours, America! Soon the skies will be as great as our land!
your data plan is better then the high cost wifi on the plane
Those pay phones were so expensive that they were barely used. Allowing people to use their all-you-can-eat cell phone plans to chat for three or four hours at a clip is entirely different.
Have you ever tried a plane WiFi? They make you sign in and then only the airline website is free, other than that, you are charged based on the downloaded amount. Given how ad rich most sites are, you'll probably end up paying the cost of your ticket if you were to use it
Actually sitting in a plane and going through it
Yeah, cell phone jammer will always be narrow banded and no signal will ever leak and jam the aircraft communications instead.
Why the NSA feels that a conversation from an air craft is any more worthy of "security" attention than one from somewhere else. Besides, it will pass through a ground station anyway, so why bother with special attention, cost, and required resources.
As much eavesdropping going on in the name of "security" does little for "terrorism" anyway. It's used far more commonly in drug and financial cases to replace actually doing their job. At best it's used to prove a case; at worst, it's used to see if there's a case to be made.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
This is for WiFi calling, not cell data. You would have to purchase WiFi access from the airline to use the onflight WiFi which already blocks things like streaming. WiFi calling would potentially be something else they block.
....but because cell phones each would be hitting dosens of towers at once vs just a couple on the ground plus this strain wouild be moving rapidly across any given area, causing network problems. Thats why cell calls are banned in flight.
The pay phones were a radio telephone system, and they were not using the normal cell network IIRC. Also, being in the air, each cell phone would ping and try to connect to dosens of towers at once vs just a couple when used on land, with this hogging 'blob' traveling rapidly with the plane. Finaly, the towers would be outputting maximum power to compensate for both the distance between tower/plane and the big metal tube which the phones are in which serves to weaken the signal anymore. It's obvious where I am going with this, so that is what lead to the ban in the first place.
Are you sure of that? Last time I flew Southwest (just weeks ago), it was $8 per device per day, with no cap, though it's slow enough that you're not going to download huge amounts of data anyway.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I was on a Delta flight last week from Atlanta to Portland, ME that had onboard wifi. It was a fixed price for the fight with no caps.
It was slow as shit, though.
Yep I have. Last flight that has wi-fi had no problem surfing websites and didn't cost me a cent. It wasn't good enough for any video though but in summary... Fly less shitty airlines. That flight also allowed me to make phone calls.
I've been next to a baby that was on full wailing for quite some time, despite the mother's best efforts and that was considerably worse than any idiot yapping on the phone. Didn't really want to make me throw myself or the baby off the plane, but I was quite happy I didn't have to deal with that every other hour of the day.
In flight the cabin air pressure is reduced as the plane goes up in altitude, to an equivalent altitude of about 9,000 feet when the airplane is at cruising altitude. This reduces stress on the airframe, by about 5-ish PSI on every inch of the cabin outer surface.
Adults have the ability to clear their eustachian by yawning, but babies generally don't. The extra air pressure causes their ears to ache for the entire flight.
That's why babies cry during an airplane flight. Mothers don't generally have to deal with it all the time.
(I wrote the firmware for one of the popular air cabin pressurization systems currently in use.)
It depends on the flight, 12 hour long haul London to Tokyo they offered an expensive 1 hour pass and a super expensive whole flight pass.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What's the big deal? Remember when planes had those obnoxious pay phones in every seat? No one had a choice then???
They were expensive and worked with credit cards. I don't recall ever seeing one in use. Not once.
No sig today...
Are you sure of that? Last time I flew Southwest (just weeks ago), it was $8 per device per day, with no cap, though it's slow enough that you're not going to download huge amounts of data anyway.
I suspect those rules aren't hard-wired into the aircraft.
No sig today...
United charged me about 25$ for 14-hour flight. And I paid in miles, so the actual cost was zero.
I bought the Wi-Fi for my phone and USB-tethered it to my laptop, so it worked fine on both devices.
The Wi-Fi was quite slow, and they tried to block all VOIP services and VPNs, but I still managed to connect to a VPN and make a very short phone call (just as a test).
1) You obviously have to pay extreme roaming prices. And it does not matter if it is a call over your own provider. They will see to it that you pay extra and a lot extra. As they are flying all other pricing regulations will be deemed void, regardless that other places are not allowed to do the same, because they are on the ground (e.g. no roaming cost or blocking in malls or conference centers)
2) If you want to book a seat where you can do calls, you need to book extra
3) If you want to book a seat where people are not calling, you need to pay extra
4) To pay for the systems to be installed, prices will increase to pay for it, regardless if you use it or not or if it is even needed or not.
5) You will be spammed 10 minutes after you get in the plane.
OK, 4 and 5 might be a bit over the tom but 1, 2 and 3 are things I could see happening.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
But neither of those charged by the kb downloaded, only the connection time.
Southwest specifically prohibits the playing of full-length movies (although they do offer movies streamed from within the plane) and make some attempt to actively block the playing. I don't know how effective the measures are. They also prohibit voice calls over the WiFi. On plenty of occasions I have dialed into a WebEx meeting and listened to the voice and put my comments into the chat window and it worked just fine.
Let's handle phone calls the same way, with a Calling and a No Calling section. The difference from the old days would be that calling in toilets would be specifically encouraged.
I used them a couple of times. I saw others use them occasionally. But they weren't commonly in use.
I've never gotten a signal turning my phone on in a plane at cruising altitude.
>each cell phone would ping and try to connect to dosens of towers at once vs just a couple when used on land, with this hogging 'blob' traveling rapidly with the plane
You are just repeating what you read somewhere. It isn't true.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
It will give job security to the TSA for all the extra screening they will need to do.
Also, don't pay attention to the sudden jump in occurrences of mid-flight manslaughter.
I was on a bus once with Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel talking to his girlfriend for two hours, loud enough for everybody to hear. Although once I got past how incredibly rude and oblivious this guy was, it was actually pretty entertaining, in a soap-opera sort of way.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I was flying in to SFO and a announcement came over PA saying we were diverting to SJC due to reaching fuel limits. Fog was causing problems at SFO delaying flights landing. There was a rush by half the plane to place calls. A short time late we got a slot at SFO and were told we would be landing there. There was a much smaller rush for the phones by those that had succeeded in making a call the first time.
My thing was in United, where I had that experience