December 10, 2004 Cellphones Aloft: The Inevitable Is Closer By KEN BELSON and MICHELINE MAYNARD http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/10/technology/10phone.html?oref=login&pagewan ted=print&position=
The day may finally be coming when you will be allowed to make calls on your own cellphone from an airliner. Trouble is, so will the passengers sitting on either side of you, and in front and in back of you, as well. Federal regulators plan next week to begin considering rules that would end the official ban on cellphone use on commercial flights. Technical challenges and safety questions remain. But if the ban is lifted, one of the last cocoons of relative social silence would disappear, forcing strangers to work out the rough etiquette of involuntary eavesdropping in a confined space. "For some people, the idea of being able to pick up their phone is going to be liberating; for some it's going to drive them crazy," said Addison Schonland, a travel industry consultant at the Innovation Analysis Group in La Jolla, Calif. "Can you imagine 200 people having a conversation at once? There's going to be a big market for noise-canceling headphones." The always-on-the-road business travelers may become the worst offenders, predicted Roger Entner, a telecommunications analyst with the Yankee Group and a frequent flier. "Businessmen will now compete with toddlers for the title of 'most annoying in the airplane,' " Mr. Entner said. It may be years before cellphones become widely used in the skies. To begin with, conventional cellphones, besides raising concerns about interfering with cockpit communications, typically do not work at altitudes above 10,000 feet or so. But some airlines have already begun their own tests of technology meant to make cellphone use feasible at 35,000 feet. They know that the seatback phones they now offer, costing $1.99 a minute or more, have never really caught on. The airlines also know that, while illegal, surreptitious cellphone use at lower altitudes is already common. Airline attendants have caught some passengers using cellphones in airplane lavatories, and others have been spotted huddled in their seats, whispering into their cupped hands. For that matter, the use of BlackBerry hand-held e-mail devices is also rampant, if sub rosa, despite their also being banned on airliners. Famously, some passengers' emergency use of cellphones played a significant role in the final minutes of the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 before it crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pa., on Sept. 11, 2001. A major federal effort to revisit the rules will begin next Wednesday at a Federal Communications Commission meeting, where the agency is expected to approve two measures. One, an order that is expected to be adopted, would try to introduce more price competition among phone companies to offer telephone and high-speed Internet services from the seatback and end-of-aisle phones that are now on many planes. The second measure will begin the regulatory process of considering whether there are technical solutions to some of the current obstacles to passengers' using their own mobile phones on planes. Safety will be a major consideration in any rule changes. The Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing, the nation's largest builder of airliners, both support the F.C.C.'s ban, arguing that cellphones can interfere with navigation systems. In fact, European newspapers widely reported that use of a cellphone contributed to the crash of a Crossair commuter plane in 2000. LX Flight 498, carrying 10 passengers and crew members, was bound for Dresden when it crashed outside Zurich minutes after it took off, killing all on board. Officially, the reason for the crash remains unknown. But news reports at the time said a passenger apparently took a cellphone call at the same time that the pilot engaged the autopilot controls. The plane subsequently went into a dive. Despite such questions, airlines have begun their own tests of whether cellphone use can be made feasible. A test last July by American Airlines, the nation's biggest, allowed the use of conventional cellphones to place and receive calls by way of a picocell - a miniature cell tower the size of a pizza box. The system was installed by the wireless equipment maker Qualcomm inside the jet. The picocell linked to several antennas inside a cable that gathered signals from passengers' cellphones and sent them all to a small satellite dish, no bigger than a laptop computer, on top of the plane. From there, the calls were beamed to an orbiting satellite, which sent the calls back to special cell stations linked to phone networks on earth. "It's only a matter of time before we have cellphones on planes," said Scott Becker, senior vice president of Qualcomm's Wireless Systems division. "A lot of the airlines are more open to looking at it now, and people are getting used to using their phones everywhere." Many industry executives say the type of technology tested by American Airlines and Qualcomm is particularly promising because, by funneling all calls through a single communications path, it will be more feasible for the airlines and carriers to track and bill the calls. (The airlines assume they would charge an access fee beyond whatever the customer's own wireless carrier assesses.) The transmission system is also more efficient than using conventional cellular technology, which would require many in-flight phones to continually search for cell towers on the ground. And because calls will be beamed to satellites and then back to earth, passengers will be able to talk while flying over water and other areas where there are few cell towers below. Also, fliers would have the added advantage of being able to receive calls as well as make them. None of this will happen soon, though. Participants in the tests, as well as members of the committee appointed by the F.A.A. to study the various technologies, do not expect any resolution to the debate for at least another two years. A crucial assessment, by the United States Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics, will not be completed until at least 2007. Others note that a technology already exists that could eventually enable passengers to call from the sky: Internet phone software that runs over high-speed data lines. So far, passengers on some non-United States airlines can pay to use high-speed Internet connections in flight through a service called Connexion by Boeing. In theory, once online with a laptop, a passenger could use Internet phone software and a headset to make calls. But so far, the Internet service is offered by only a handful of airlines like Lufthansa and JAL on a few long-haul flights, and Connexion by Boeing is not promoting the system as a way to make phone calls. Given the cash-short airline industry's need for income, though, many travel industry analysts say that - whatever the regulatory and technical hurdles - phone calls from the sky are inevitable. "They will be a revenue stream," predicted Terry Wiseman, publisher of Airfax.com, an online newsletter. "If the price is low, and if you can get billed directly through your carrier, people are going to use the phones." Which is what worries some frequent travelers. "The last thing I want is a bunch of jabbering business geeks," said Paul Saffo, a technology industry consultant who travels 200,000 miles a year on United Airlines and said that flying was his only escape from e-mail and phone calls. "The only quiet time I get is when I fly. It's my meditation time." It will be up to the airline industry, and its passengers, to work out the new terms of engagement, even if the results are as uneven as in other travel industries. Around metropolitan New York City, for example, the main commuter railroads allow unfettered use of cellphones - to the annoyance of tens of thousands of nonchattering commuters a day - but on many East Coast Amtrak trains there are typically one or more "quiet cars" where the phones are prohibited. Rich Salter, an in-flight electronics expert with the Salter Group, a consulting firm in Irvine, Calif., said there was already an airline industry proposal circulating that would restrict phone use to only certain portions of each flight. "Maybe the old 'No Smoking' sign could be used as a 'No Talking' sign," he said. Stephen Labaton, in Washington; Matt Richtel, in San Francisco; and Christopher Elliott, in Orlando, Fla., contributed reporting for this article. You are a subscribed member of the infowarrior list. 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