A couple of new proposals aim to address concerns by the FCC and FAA that have prevented the use of cell phones on airplanes: One of the proposals, from AirCell, includes routing calls from a picocell on the plane to specialized base stations on the ground. One factor this article doesn't explore is why AirCell would propose to bypass existing cell towers. An engineer at a cellular operator once explained to me that using the regular cell towers would tie up an extraordinary amount of bandwidth on the terrestrial cell phone networks, as the phones in the air communicate with the many sites in range on the ground. The AirCell proposal would avoid that problem by attracting all of the cell phones to a local picocell, then transferring just the call traffic to a ground station.
