Imagine making a call from the skies without stirring up a hornet’s nest or worse the air hostess frowning upon you! Passengers may be soon allowed to use their mobile phones on planes flying through European airspace. The EU countries plan to intro a technology, which allows one to make mobile calls without the risk of interference with aircraft systems. If given the green signal, the service would allow calls to be made when a plane is more than 3,000 meters high. The facility will be provided at the discretion of the individual airline. Obviously the cost of making a mobile phone call from a plane will be higher than making one from the ground. The calls will be billed through passengers’ mobile networks. The current plan is for 2G phones only but if the services proved successful, it could be rolled out to 3G and other standards in the future.

This is how the system works, “The proposed system utilizes an on-board base station in the plane which communicates with passengers’ own handsets. The base station – called a pico cell – is low power and creates a network area big enough to encompass the cabin of the plane. The base station routes phone traffic to a satellite, which is in turn connected to mobile networks on the ground. A network control unit on the plane is used to ensure that mobiles in the plane do not connect to any base stations on the ground. It blocks the signal from the ground so that phones cannot connect and remain in an idle state.”
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