Airplane inflight SMS texting: Starting now on Quantas

Ah !

One of my pet pieves (the stupid and totally misleading announcements that mobile phones supposedly interfere with airplane avionics) is starting to find its end... Quantas has just received permission to start a one-year trial on one of their aircraft to allow passengers to send and receive SMS text messages during flight.  The story was covered by texting specialist website of the SMS association, 160 Characters.

YES !  About time !

Comments

[Shane Williamson]

Pssssst! Tomi! It's QANTAS, not Quantas :-)

Shane W

[Tomi Ahonen]

Hi Shane

Oh NOOOOO.... How many YEARS have I mistyped that airline name. I've flown Qantas at least some 20 times, and I've somehow always inserted that letter U into the name. You are totally right, yes its Qantas.

Sorry about that. I will correct my nasty ways. I'll leave the spelling error there in the blog to show my ignorance, but will fix this from now on in all my writing (and will fix the related slide with that Pearl)

Thanks Shane, sorry about that...

Tomi :-)

[David Cushman]

Any reason why they won't allow an MMS - pics from the plane would be cool to friends and family.
Just spent a few days in New York. 3 made if free for me to sms to the UK - nice.
Oddly, I never saw a 3G signal on my phone the whole time I was there. New York must have 3G, so how come I didn't get it?

[Tomi Ahonen]

Hi David

Don't know about why not MMS, probably just starting with the basics for now. I'm sure full telephony services will follow soon enough (and I'd much rather limit my co-passengers to silent texting, than babbling on voice calls on the flights ha-ha)

About 3G reception in New York/USA. New York does have 3G, but its the "other" 3G variant used by about 15% of the world's 3G networks, the so-called American 3G, ie CDMA2000 EV-DO for example on the Verizon network in New York.

CDMA2000 EV-DO is not compatible with your Three/Hutchison phone which is on the WCDMA standard (which is an evolution of the GSM standard and the 3G standard used by about 85% of the world's networks). Your WCDMA/GSM phone won't be able to communicate with EV-DO networks. WCDMA and/or HSDPA its 3.5G evolution is being now rolled out in America but its not yet in commercial production. This is why you didn't get a 3G signal.

Many Americans are offered EDGE as supposedly a 3G technology, when the purists think of it as only a 2.8G technology (much like the simpler variant of CDMA2000 1x RTT which is considered a 2.75G technology)

Thanks for stopping by and sharing experiences from your trip. Alan was just on the East Coast a few weeks ago and he had the worst experiences with the airlines ha-ha, as you've probably noticed from the postings we've made here tracing his luggage etc.

Cheers

Tomi :-)