Use your mobile inflight

Filed in archive Wireless on April 20, 2007

If trials by Qantas, Emirates and Ryanair are positive, using your mobile phone while in-flight may make it possible to do business as usual while flying.

Evidently, the flag-bearer Australian airline is the first to trial an in-flight system that will enable passengers to use their own phones in-flight. Qantas is fitting just one of its Boeing 767 (pictured above) planes with this new system. Using mobiles in air right now without this system causes mobile phones to go search for a network; and as the phone cannot find any network close-by, each mobile phone searches at full power. It is this full power searching that has in the past authorities worried that such power from numbers of mobiles could interfere with "radio" flight systems.

What Qantas is trialling is a system that uses a network antennae (a wire running from one end of the plane to the other) which is a mobile phone network aerial. When a mobile phone is turned on and goes search for a network it finds one very close and so allows the mobile phone to use its very low power to communicate with this network.

To use your mobile phone in-flight you will however need to have International Roaming turned on even though you might be travelling a domestic air route. Each plane fitted with this new technology will be registered as a "different country" complete with its own International phone code (like USA is "1", and UK "44" and Australia "61"). Anyone calling your number will still call your number as thought you are anywhere within your domestic dialling system, and the call will be forwarded to you on your flight.

So evidently if this system becomes common on flights worldwide, you will be contactable by your company, family or whoever through this system.

All eyes will be focussed on these three airlines and their testing in the next few months. Qantas has just one plane fitted and each flight the plane embarks on travellers will be told at the point of embarking that they will be able to use their phones.

In the meantime, we await the trials and hope that this can provide us with the capability of being "always-on" and "wirelessly" wired.