Yesterday's the Financial Times covered the latest moves an innovations by Europe's largest discount airline, Ryanair.
It looks like Ryanair is going to be the first airline to allow regular passengers to use their mobile phones on the planes to make calls and send text messages while the plane is flying, later this year. (It is about time).
Several things. For the techies out there, this will be done with a cellular telecoms basestation of the "picocell" type and size that is located inside the airframe. Rather than our cellular phones attempting to connect briefly to each consecutive radio antenna on the ground with the Jet flying by at 900 km/h, now the mobile phone just connects to the base station inside the plane, transmits at low power because of the short distance, and the regular mobile phone traffic on the ground is not disrupted.
More interestingly for readers of this blog, this is yet another case of infringing on someone else's market area. Ryanair is now becoming a mobile telecoms operator. It negotiates with the Vodafones and Oranges and T-Mobiles of the world and has their phones "roam" while inside Ryanair's airplanes. Ryanair then takes a cut out of the call roaming fee. I would assume the costs will be roughly of the same rate as calling the destination where you are flying to, with perhaps an "airplane premium" on top. Still these calls should be much cheaper than those airplane phones we used to have ten-fifteen years ago.
And yes, this makes Ryanair an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator). What is funny, that this MVNO is itself mobile - or its network at least is as all the equipment is used inside flying airplanes. And a further funny play on words, its wireless yes, and airlines, their industry talks about them being carriers. So its now a wireless carrier carrier, which is of course itself wireless. Or its a mobile operator that is mobile.
And yes, expect a lot of people to protest that there should be peace and quiet inside airplanes. But the reality of modern airline operations - most airlines are working feverishly to accomplish small savings per passenger-mile flown, doing things like eliminating the pull-down window shades just to save time for clean-up crews, or now Ryanair introducing surcharges for passengers with check-in luggage. In that kind of mindset, if you can get roaming phone charges of 1-2 Euros per minute, or 35 cents per roaming SMS text message, and share in that kind of revenues - multiply that by 150 passengers per plane, each of whom now has a phone, and most of whom do voice calls and text messages relating to the travel. Yes, I can see the airlines are eager to tap into this new revenue source.
And from a "lets make the cake bigger" point of view of economics, ha-ha, I would argue that some of that traffic that will come from airplanes is the kind of communication that would not happen without this ability. If my flight is late, and I know this in the air, and I could call the person who is leaving home to meet me at the airport - I would of course call or send a message so the other person isn't coming too early and have to wait. But if I can't use my phone until I have landed, then the other person is already there, and there is no reason to call anyore. These kinds of travel schedule hassle -type of calls and messages are likely to be plentiful. Or imagine that you were able to switch to an earlier flight, but had to rush into the plane immediately, didn't have time to make the call from the gate. Again, now way to contact the other person, but if we could call from the plane, this is new telecoms traffic that otherwise would not happen.
And yes, I can imagine that some airlines may even experiment with some "phone-free zones" ha ha and ask passengers to move to an other part of the plane to make calls.
Still, its an innovation which is long overdue.
And it also puts into an interesting light that silly announcement we get on many airlines when they say that mobile phones should be switched off "because they interfere with aircraft instruments" ha-ha, what utter nonsense. Ryanair the ultimate discount airline has not suddenly gone out to rip out all of its instrumentation, and shield it against cellular telecoms radiation... No, airline instruments were never in any way affected by modern mobile telecoms equipment. Its just one of those silly things the airline staff has been teached to say, and some of them actually believe that mobile phones are hazardous to airline safety, ha-ha.
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