No more airplane mode? EU to allow calls on flights | Hacker News Reader

No more airplane mode? EU to allow calls on flights

bbc.com

14 pointsKomoD5 comments

Oh good. Flights aren’t quite miserable enough right now; let’s add your seat neighbor jabbering on all flight.

I was annoyed I couldn't join a zoom call while flying as a participant, however it seems a small price to pay to not have someone trying to lead a stand-up next to you.

No reason they can’t stick a designated call spot at the end of the plane where people can make their calls. Why does everything have to be a negative?

Something does not make sense here, either the article or the EU does not understand the technology behind the buzz:

  The EU Commission has reserved certain frequency bands for aircraft since 2008, allowing some services to offer mid-air internet access.

  But this service has been historically slow, as it relied on equipment to connect people via a satellite between the aeroplane and the ground.

Even there is 5g femtocells in the airplane, the connectivity will still go through satellite connection, so the total speed and latency should not be that different of wifi.

And clearly, 5g frequencies being higher, you will not have better reception from ground cells...

> And clearly, 5g frequencies being higher, you will not have better reception from ground cells...

5G added spectrum all over. 600Mhz is new for 5G and lower than any previous mobile spectrum. Lots of additions above previous spectrum, including the double digit GHz stuff that's for dense situations (maybe in a plane?). But air to ground certainly isn't going to work much better at 600 Mhz or 25 Ghz than it did at 1900Mhz. The problem is still if you're in the air, you're in view of too many towers at any given time to effectively communicate, but you're also travelling much too fast. It could be possible to build a network of ground stations designed for this, but it wasn't ever done. I'd wonder if spaceX could do something interesting with planes communicating with their ground stations directly or via the LEO constellation.

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