From what I understand, the reason why people shout in to a cell phone is the absence of the background noise of a wired phone. You think the connection has gone dead, so people speak louder. And I would think that speaking more loudly takes more concentration, so you ignore more of what's going on around you.
Here, some constitutional rights are suspended when it comes to any form of public conveyance travel, starting from airports and bus stations and water ports, especially within 100 miles of international borders, which covers something like 80%+ of the population. For example, once you enter an airport screening checkpoint line, you can't leave it. Your rights to free speech are curtailed, your right to search and seizure, etc.
Talking on a cell phone has been banned because early cell phones were pretty crude in terms of the amount of radio noise they generated and they interfered with the aircraft's navigation and control systems. New cells have really cleaned up their transmitters to emit less noise as part of an efficiency drive to use less power and get more signal users in to crowded bandwidth allotments, and with improvements in avionics systems, the FAA says that now they don't interfere. So it wasn't federal law that prohibited the use of electronics on aircraft, it was Federal Aviation Administration regulations, which have now been changed.
The other advance in technology was in-aircraft electronics that created signal relays so that your phone could actually make connections. This is a two-part problem. First, the transmitter in your phone is really weak to extend battery life, which is why you see so many cell phone towers and increasing numbers in higher population density areas. So a signal from 40,000 feet isn't going to hit towers very well. Second, the cell towers themselves hand-off calls between towers as you move to load-balance: if Tower A is approaching its limit and some of the signal traffic can be handed off to B which has little load, people's calls shift to B and they never know it, this applies to voice, text, and data. So you're flying along at 40,000 feet at 600 MPH, covering a mile every six seconds. If you just amplify the cell signal to hit the ground, you're hitting a wide swath of towers and then switching between them very rapidly, which the system just couldn't handle, so the other technical hurdle was to improve the infrastructure of the switching network.
There were some big technical hurdles to overcome, and unfortunately, they've overcome them and now we're going to add mass stress to an already stressful event.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2013-12-14 05:58 pm (UTC)Here, some constitutional rights are suspended when it comes to any form of public conveyance travel, starting from airports and bus stations and water ports, especially within 100 miles of international borders, which covers something like 80%+ of the population. For example, once you enter an airport screening checkpoint line, you can't leave it. Your rights to free speech are curtailed, your right to search and seizure, etc.
Talking on a cell phone has been banned because early cell phones were pretty crude in terms of the amount of radio noise they generated and they interfered with the aircraft's navigation and control systems. New cells have really cleaned up their transmitters to emit less noise as part of an efficiency drive to use less power and get more signal users in to crowded bandwidth allotments, and with improvements in avionics systems, the FAA says that now they don't interfere. So it wasn't federal law that prohibited the use of electronics on aircraft, it was Federal Aviation Administration regulations, which have now been changed.
The other advance in technology was in-aircraft electronics that created signal relays so that your phone could actually make connections. This is a two-part problem. First, the transmitter in your phone is really weak to extend battery life, which is why you see so many cell phone towers and increasing numbers in higher population density areas. So a signal from 40,000 feet isn't going to hit towers very well. Second, the cell towers themselves hand-off calls between towers as you move to load-balance: if Tower A is approaching its limit and some of the signal traffic can be handed off to B which has little load, people's calls shift to B and they never know it, this applies to voice, text, and data. So you're flying along at 40,000 feet at 600 MPH, covering a mile every six seconds. If you just amplify the cell signal to hit the ground, you're hitting a wide swath of towers and then switching between them very rapidly, which the system just couldn't handle, so the other technical hurdle was to improve the infrastructure of the switching network.
There were some big technical hurdles to overcome, and unfortunately, they've overcome them and now we're going to add mass stress to an already stressful event.