Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Sunday, April 15, 2007
Phones on a plane, not just yet
The author of Why cell phones are still grounded means the reasons are altogether different from those officially stated. It supposedly all boils down to money, effort and politics. Here are a few tidbits:
Quote: 'The airlines fear "crowd control" problems if cell phones are allowed in flights. They believe cell phone calls might promote rude behavior and conflict between passengers, which flight attendants would have to deal with. The airlines also benefit in general from passengers remaining ignorant about what's happening on the ground during flights, including personal problems, terrorist attacks, plane crashes and other information that might upset passengers.'
Quote: 'they want to profit from it. Simply allowing passengers to use their own cell phones in flight would leave the airlines out of the profit-taking.'
Quote: '[the phone] might have roughly equal access to two or more towers that use the same channels, which confuses the carriers' computer systems.'
Quote: 'Keeping the ban is the safe decision for the politically ambitious.'
What I found from my frequent travelling a few years ago was that many people didn't turn off their phones. I've even seen people turning the phone to 'silent' mode on the plane. Whether they actually thought that would make the radio shut down I don't know. This means, on any given flight there are several phones still turned on.
A few flights have detectors, and in those cases the staff has been quite strict on finding those still activated phones. Not so on almost all flights.
Quote: 'The airlines fear "crowd control" problems if cell phones are allowed in flights. They believe cell phone calls might promote rude behavior and conflict between passengers, which flight attendants would have to deal with. The airlines also benefit in general from passengers remaining ignorant about what's happening on the ground during flights, including personal problems, terrorist attacks, plane crashes and other information that might upset passengers.'
Quote: 'they want to profit from it. Simply allowing passengers to use their own cell phones in flight would leave the airlines out of the profit-taking.'
Quote: '[the phone] might have roughly equal access to two or more towers that use the same channels, which confuses the carriers' computer systems.'
Quote: 'Keeping the ban is the safe decision for the politically ambitious.'
What I found from my frequent travelling a few years ago was that many people didn't turn off their phones. I've even seen people turning the phone to 'silent' mode on the plane. Whether they actually thought that would make the radio shut down I don't know. This means, on any given flight there are several phones still turned on.
A few flights have detectors, and in those cases the staff has been quite strict on finding those still activated phones. Not so on almost all flights.
