FCC chairman seeks to keep voice call ban in place on airplanes | Hacker News Reader

FCC chairman seeks to keep voice call ban in place on airplanes

usatoday.com

10 pointsgnicholas19 comments

> Frank Wake of Anchorage said allowing calls would be “cruel and unusual torture for those of us trapped.”

> 96% favoring the ban, 2% favoring the ban with exceptions for emergencies and 2% saying airlines should set their own policies.

People don't like other people.

well with regards to how many can be rude from a sense of entitlement it probably is best not to open this barn door. then throw in the people who will have to be told individually when to hang up and won't, we really don't need another reason to create belligerent fliers.

That is a funny ratio, given far more people casually whip out their phone in public transport and start yapping away.

Flights seem like a bigger deal than hoping on a bus/train. There is a much higher barrier to entry, more regulation, and people take it pretty serious. You don't get a pat down on the bus.

> You don't get a pat down on the bus.

Nobody's worried that you'll destroy valuable property or kill people by driving a bus into it/them. They probably should be.

Mind-bending how the same person can say that personal data privacy should be the domain of the market, but cell phone usage on airplanes should be disallowed based on a preference for quiet on an airplane.

I can respect the position that regulation is bad, and careful application of new regulations. I won't necessarily agree with it, but I can respect it as simply coming from different fundamental values. But this is such blatant hypocrisy that I'm having trouble suppressing rage heh.

Yea, this is pretty mind boggling.

> Pai told USA TODAY in a statement. “Taking it off the table permanently will be a victory for Americans across the country who, like me, value a moment of quiet at 30,000 feet.”

I fail to see the hypocrisy. The privacy protections protect the consumer from a monopolistic ISP, while the other protects consumers from other inconsiderate consumers.

So the primary reason for this ban is nothign to do witih communication or interference, it's just some notion that if cell phones were allowed on flights it would be annoying to the people around you? This is why the judiciary should abandon the "rational basis" approach to evaluating legislation (i.e. you don't have to actually justify your laws/rules) in favor of something where the government has to make the case that something should be banned for a specific reason.

Regulating the social norms of airline behavior is not the job of the FCC, and it astonishes me that anyone thinks otherwise just because the FCC happens to have some power over one lever to control this.

IANAL: I can see how, from a legal perspective, FCC could disallow cell towers from connecting to obviously-flying devices. I could see them forcing device manufacturers to switch off in flight. I don't see how FCC can legally insert itself into the commercial environment of air travel in the way it has inserted itself here. FAA could, but this is not FCC's bailiwick. This is like them deciding that we can't use mobile phones in the waiting room at the dentist's office. If anyone gets to make that stupid regulation, it should be the agency that regulates dentistry.

It's not that it's "disallowed", it's the technology isn't designed to do it. Cell towers aren't aimed at the sky for a myriad of reasons (they use sector antennas), and the protocols are designed at much slower velocities than an airplane. An airplane also has line-of-sight to hundreds of cell towers, which would make cell selection very difficult, and the networks would quickly run out of spectrum since one handset signal would reach hundreds of towers rather than the handful they do on the ground.

Theoretically, the data services offered by planes could host a picocell tower. But the data service used by airplanes is much different than cell networks. Sattelite based services use antennas on top of the plane and have to have specialized tracking antennas. ATG based systems use a network of land based stations and special antennas pointed above the horizon. ATG uses a modified EVDO protocol (yep, that old cell protocol) to work at higher base station velocities.

The arguments against allowing voice calls are not based on the technology but the idea of not wanting to listen to other people's conversations.

> Pai told USA TODAY in a statement. “Taking it off the table permanently will be a victory for Americans across the country who, like me, value a moment of quiet at 30,000 feet.”

> But Pai's predecessor as FCC chairman, Thomas Wheeler, argued that the ban had become obsolete because many airliners basically carry their own cellphone towers for in-flight entertainment.

I think airlines should have policies disallowing it, but I don't see how the in-cabin ambience of an airplane is even remotely what the FCC exists to regulate.

I would hate to be in an airplane with people making voice calls, but I don't think it's even remotely the FCC's job (and I'm somewhat dubious it's even properly the government's job) to do it, and, while I'm neither, I'm closer to a socialist than a laissez-faire supporter of unregulated capitalism.

Why can't we just let the airlines decide for themselves if they want to allow voice calls on their flights.

This does not seem like something that should be regulated. The airline should be able to say yes or no.

I thought Pai was against regulation.

Any and all regulation?

Only regulation he disagrees with.

I don't understand. How does this benefit Verizon?

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