About those mobile phones on planes..

I picked up a number of news stories during the vacation and will blog briefly about them over the next few days as I return back to work..

One was in the Economist on Aug 9, where they discussed the use of mobile phones on planes. As we've reported here several times, various airlines have announced intentions to, then started pilot projects, and now are rolling out services to allow passengers to use mobile phones on planes.

And very predictably, there is a big outcry by the general public against this idea. Nobody wants to sit next to some blabbermouth talking about their life on the phone during a 12 hour flight..  Yeah. But lets get real. First, that most who are in these surveys, are not regular travellers. Among frequent fliers, it is a very different attitude to phones on planes.

Secondly, these airplane calls will be more expensive than the same calls on the ground. It is most unlikely that people will want to spend a lot of time yapping on the phone in a plane.

But mostly, the far more convenient use in planes both for the person communicating and the fellow passengers - is of course SMS text messaging. Totally private, non-intrusive, it is the natural method to use a mobile phone when seated shoulder-to-shoulder in the middle seat of cattle-class..

So, any surprise that this mobile telecoms consultant is very happy that we are finally getting to be conneted also on flights? No surprise here ha-ha, I'm always happy when our industry figures out ways to make more money as we approach the trillion dollar industry level at the end of this decade..

Well, clearly the vacation has not cured me of my long intros to try to get to my point, eh?  What was the Economist saying on the 9th of August? Couple of fascinating findings from early trials and tests of phones on planes. Emirates has been using the technology to allow mobile phone use on planes since March of this year, on 10 of their aircraft. The reaction has been "overwhelmingly positive" with half of passengers switching on a phone during an average flight. That sounds good to me. A phone that is turned on, means also it can receive communciations (call attempts even if not answered, and of course SMS text messages). Overwhelmingly positive? Sounds good. How about the calls? The average call length has been two and a half minutes. Well less than the average length of a normal mobile phone call, which is nearly four minutes. Thus even if you happen to sit next to someone who speaks twice as long as the average, it is only a five minute call.. This does not seem like the torture that many imagined.

Also Emirates found that most calls were made in daytime hours, very few calls were in night time. What was the most popular use on Emirates? SMS text messaging of course. Of course!

The article also talked of Air France's trials which were short haul flights in Europe and Northern Africa. Interesting tidbits. 80% of the passengers wanted the system expanded to cover all of Air France's flights. And the average flight generated 100 SMS text messages..  If we assume its a mid-size Airbus plane carrying some 150-200 passengers, then they get something like half a text message sent per passenger. Not bad. I think if this continues - and as SMS text messaging continues to grow - this number will also grow.

Yeah, I like this development.

Comments

[Dean Bubley]

Tomi

The big potential problem I see with inflight cellular is not outbound calls/SMS - it's the inbound traffic & associated ringtones.

I'd certainly imagine that few people would initiate noisy conversations during the hours of "darkness" on a longhaul flight. But the issue has to be sleeping in a cabin with 200 other people who could well be *receiving* SMS or calls from people (or computers) in their home timezone, unaware they're midflight.

If you work out the stats it starts to be quite scary - on a full 747 you have about 100 people within 10 rows of you - I'd guess that during a 5-hour "lights off" part of an overnight flight, you could easily get 30+ inbound events with associated ringtones.

One option might be to make the inflight system accept outbound traffic only, during "dark" hours.

Dean

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Dean

Good point. I would assume we're getting also a change to our in-flight safety lecture (why do they still start it off by teaching us to put on a seat belt? Aren't we a couple of decades past the point of that "lesson")

I'd guess they'll alter the safety lecture to include guidelines on how to set the phones and the pilot or head steward to make an announcement about silent mode when the airplane is dimmed for sleep time on long hault, etc..

But yes, there are plenty of annoying ringing tones as it is, and imagine a little telecoms tech glitch on the interconnectivity during an intercontinental flight, that suddenly sends 100 messages every three hours, and a tech unsavvy grandpa with his grandson's phone, who doesn't know how to switch the weird phone's ringing off.. We'll have some horror stories (like we have of airline stories in general, like the one passenger in the USA who was forced to sit in the toilet for the flight ha-ha..)

Thanks for writing Dean

Tomi :-)