In-Flight VOIP Coming Soon

hdtv writes "U.S. airline customers are likely to be thrilled with an opportunity to sit next to someone constantly chatting on the phone. Information Week magazine is reporting that government auction is opening a way for telecoms to introduce voice-over-IP links on in-flight communication systems." From the article: "Airfone already offers phone service on many flights, but its high cost has limited its use. JetBlue has declined to say what its LiveTV LCC unit would do with a winning frequency. Although many frequent flyers and airline attendants favor a ban on the phone chatter, Connexion by Boeing, whose Internet service is already offered on nearly 200 international flights a day, notes that there have been no complaints of in-cabin incidents about the technology. The Connexion service is regularly used by passengers to make VoIP calls. "

Re:Really??

[dean.collins]

well I can tell you for a fact that the connection times on lufthansa work great, we have no only run a voip call from their USA/Europe but also ran a video conference on our in house FMS based video conference server.

I think there is even a screen shot of it on the http://www.unisona.com/ [unisona.com] website.

Dean

Re:danger?

[nsayer]

RFI is not the reason cell phones are banned on airplanes. It's nothing to do with the FAA. It's against FCC regulations because the cellphone up in the air is visible to way too many cell towers and thus causes excessive interference. A pico-cell in the plane, as you said, fixes all that by forcing the phones to work at extremely low power. But unless they put a pico cell in for every carrier, it's going to make enforcement a problem. How are the baliffs^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstewards going to know whether someone on a cell phone is legally using the plane's picocell or not?

I was on SouthWest about 6 months ago. Before we took off, I put my phone in airplane mode so that when we got up to cruising altitude I could play games on it. I then turned it off. The plane took off and got up to cruising altitude and when they said you could bring out your portable electronics, I fired it up and was immediately accosted. I explained that I had put the phone in airplane mode and that its transmitter was disabled. They said, "We don't recognize airplane modes. Turn it off." With a grumble, I did so. Meanwhile, the bozo three rows up pulls out his treo and starts using it. I don't know whether he had his in airplane mode or not. But he got a pass. I effectively got shat on because of the shape of my computer.