AirCall patent for In-flight Cell Phone Service
10th July 2003 by Simon
There’s been a lot of questioning muttering about the real reasons for banning mobile phone usage on airplanes, with many people aware that they’ve accidentally left their phones on during flights and the plane hasn’t fallen out of the sky.
One popular school of thought is that the effect of leaving mobiles is actually on the cellular carriers, not necessarily on the safety of the plane. During land-based use, mobile phones are either in one cell or an adjoining cell, but when they are in the air, they can be communicating with many cells at once, causing great confusion to the cell phone companies systems. The more cynical commentators also point out that the airlines make a pretty handsome profit from selling usage of their in-flight phone services.
US companies AirCell have been given a patent which will
allow passengers to use their own mobile phones in-flight. Reading between the lines, it sounds like it might act as a funnel. By communicating with the phones on-board it keeps the phones signal-strength to minimum, thus avoiding the land-based cells getting confused. It would gathers the connections of all of the on-board phones and pass them through to specific land-based base-stations in an orderly fashion.
A neat solution that keeps the cellular companies happy and the airlines, as it would remain a chargeable service - with the added bonus that they don’t have to pay for having handsets fitted to each seat.
- Possibly related posts -
- BT makes it complex - again
- Self Defined Flight Search: Scheme
- FlyBe charges extra for baggage and more - Beware
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Brilliant! Just what I was looking for - thanks, Simon.
G
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