Improving the use of cell phones on airbone planes

[Jumzey]

How can the use of cell phones be improved upon without interfering with the plane`s navigational instruments

 

[enjunear]

Make them all use a common frequency plan (LO, IF freqs), and be tested to strict EMI standards. That way aircraft manufacturers could effectively shield the internal systems from the known freqencies, rather than the plethora of frequency plans that exist today (different from vendor to vendor, and model to model).

It wouldn't do you much good anyway, since you are so high up you can't stay in contact with a tower long enough to connect a call, or do a proper hand-off between towers to maintain a call.

The better solution might be to make cell phones have an aircraft-mode that uses a small range of frequencies that interfaces with an onboard relay system that routes all of the phone traffic to an antenna outside the aircraft that ties into the cellular/telephone communication systems (a SATCOM link, perhaps?).

 

[DXNewcastle]

How can the use of cell phones be improved upon without interfering with the plane's navigational instruments

To improve the use of cellphones in aircraft you would need someone to provide a global network of transmitters & receivers covering the globe's seas, oceans, uninhabited arctic and antarctic regions and uninhabited land areas. You would need to connect all of these to the terrestrial telephone networks. You would need to change the dispersion of many (perhaps most) existing transmitters and receivers to improve their coverage of airspace. You will need to design a tariff for mobile phone use which generates the revenue to pay for the financing of all that infrastructure.

I think interference with aircraft navigational equipment will be comparatively easy and trivial if you could figure out a way to finance the network.