TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Cellphones in Flight? This Means War!

Re: Cellphones in Flight? This Means War!

AES (siegman@stanford.edu)
Thu, 30 Mar 2006 16:59:44 -0800

In article <telecom25.122.11@telecom-digest.org>, kludge@panix.com
(Scott Dorsey) wrote:

> But, it requires a continuous link from the "tower" in the plane to a
> ground station through which calls are routed.

> Technically, I think the system is a good idea and it solves pretty
> much all of the technical issues that make cell phone use in planes a
> bad idea. Socially, I think it's terrible and the only good thing
> about being on an airliner is being free of people yammering on
> cellphones. But technical solutions to social problems never work.

But this situation would at least hold the possibility of a compromise
solution in which the "tower" is only turned on for, say, 30 minutes
out of every 4 hours, or turned off during sleeping periods, or . . .

Although if the airline is deriving revenue from the tower through a
surcharge on calls made through it, as seems likely, even that is
probably too much to hope for.

How about a couple of "phone-booth" seats back by the lavatories, with
a per-minute use charge? (which could in fact be collected
automatically by a surcharge that's not paid on the spot, but goes on
the caller or callee's phone bill for the call)

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