Todd Allcock wrote:
> At 14 May 2008 16:56:52 -0400 Kurt Ullman wrote:
>
>> You know of many private planes that have 150 or more in them, let
>> alone 300 or more. The concentration of the signal from many people in
>> one place is what concerns the FCC.
>
>
> Perhaps the FCC isn't really concerned at all, but just in the pocket of
> the all-powerful "Airfone" lobby... ;-)
Is Airfone still around? All the flights I've been on in the past three
years or so have not had any Airfones. Verizon had a deal for a while
where you could sign up for very low cost Airfone service charged to
your cell phone bill, and there was monthly charge to get the low rates,
you just had to have them enable it on your account. They dropped the
program a while back.
In any case, Kurt is incorrect, the reason the FCC prohibits them is
because they would confuse the ground based towers. The phones would be
trying to register with hundreds of base stations at the same time, and
calls would have to be handed off very rapidly. It's not the
concentration of signal they're worried about, it's potentially hundreds
of individual signals disrupting the network. |