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Cell phone wars coming to an aircraft near you
Question:
Cell phones have long been banned from aircraft in north america. In recent times, some airlines outside north america have made plans to incude micro cells in an aircraft to provide some wireless services such as SMS and GPRS on passenger’s own cellphones. Recently, Qualcomm, the owner of the proprietary CDMA protocol used in the USA, made an official test in the USA to show that cellphones do not interfere with avionics and where there is an emitter inside the aircraft, the phones don’t lock onto ground stations. From the plane, it is a satellite link back to the land based networks. The test was done with American Airlines. Now, if the FAA does allow this to happen, I can foresee interesting wars in the cellphone industry. If Airline A goes with carrier 1 and airline B goes with carrier 2, then this will be quite similar to frequent flyier loyalty that used to exist: a customer that uses carrier 2 is less likely to fly Airline A if airline A doesn’t support his phone in flight. And I can see airlines negotiating sweet deals with a particular carrier to allow that carrier on board its fleet of aircraft, along with marketing campaigns.
Response:
– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -> Cell phones have long been banned from aircraft in north america. > In recent times, some airlines outside north america have made plans to incude > micro cells in an aircraft to provide some wireless services such as SMS and > GPRS on passenger’s own cellphones. > Recently, Qualcomm, the owner of the proprietary CDMA protocol used in the > USA, made an > official test in the USA to show that cellphones do not interfere with > avionics and where there is an emitter inside the aircraft, the phones don’t > lock onto ground stations. From the plane, it is a satellite link back to the > land based networks. The test was done with American Airlines. > Now, if the FAA does allow this to happen, I can foresee interesting wars in > the cellphone industry. If Airline A goes with carrier 1 and airline B goes > with carrier 2, then this will be quite similar to frequent flyier loyalty > that used to exist: a customer that uses carrier 2 is less likely to fly > Airline A if airline A doesn’t support his phone in flight. > And I can see airlines negotiating sweet deals with a particular carrier to > allow that carrier on board its fleet of aircraft, along with marketing
campaigns. I do believe that is plausible, but I bet the major carriers don’t really want to piss off their bread and butter (business travelers), so I’ll bet they’ll be made to support multiple cellphone companies.