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July 17, 2004

Airways Safe for Talking

By Glenn Fleishman

Qualcomm lofts media, officials to show that plane stays in air while cell phones used: Qualcomm would certainly enjoy having more people using more advanced phones more of the time, and their proof-of-concept with a commercial American Airlines aircraft—but obviously not a commercial flight—out of Dallas/Ft. Worth on Thursday was intended to gather data and allay fears.

The fear of cell phones used in the air is certainly a bogeyman: there are a few known, unexplained instances of a cell phone in use that may have affected some airplane equipment, but there’s no widely known, widely reproduced instances of cell phones affecting systems. The FAA is following a better safe than sorry approach. A Boeing engineering magazine article from 2000 has a fascinating article that doesn’t entirely disprove this, but shows how hard it is to reproduce problems even with the equipment that was said to cause the problem in the first place. It’s a good read, as it’s sensible and conservative without being one-sided. Boeing has interests on both sides of this regulatory and spectrum fence, to be sure.

The FCC bans cell phones in flight because an airborne cell phone can wind up using the same frequency on dozens of terrestrial base stations at the same time, which has the potential to wreak some havoc on the ground by tying up spectrum and abusing handoff.

Qualcomm was testing a picocell that was onboard the aircraft: that cell captures all of the on-board cellular communications and relays it to a special ground station. It’s like a cellular network proxy instead of just a shunt to the cell network. This is the third of these kinds of tests from different firms that I’m aware of from just the last few weeks. The friendly skies will be even more full of chatter soon. While the picocell was 3G, according to the press release, only voice and text messages were used over the system—no pure data. An American Airlines EVP is quoted in the article saying that in-air cell use is about two years away, which conforms with what’s being said elsewhere.

Industrial-grade earplugs or stereo earpieces—which can be custom-molded for your canals—will probably be a good growth industry for the flying market. Expect to see in-flight magazines half full of advertisements on reducing irritation of adjacent loud talkers.

Posted by Glennf at July 17, 2004 4:40 PM

Categories: Air Travel, Cellular, Future

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