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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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