Europe Begins Testing In-Flight Use of Cellphones - by Stephen Castle
François Germain, a BP executive, was one of the first passengers to put Air France’s pilot program allowing cellphone calls in flight to the test. The results last week were not quite as he hoped. Emirates, the largest carrier in the Mideast, has already equipped an Airbus A340 fight from Dubai to Casablanca with mobile technology and intends to extend the service to its entire fleet over the next several months. Ryanair, a low-cost European carrier popular among a young and chatty clientele, is planning to offer in-flight calls, anticipating potentially lucrative profits from the service. But a number of hurdles must be overcome before more airlines offer the service. The technology, which allows cellphone users to make and receive calls through an onboard base station linked to a satellite, delivers a still-patchy quality that keeps most in-flight calls short and tinny. And then there are the eye-popping roaming charges of up to 3 euros ($4.72) a minute. On a recent Air France test flight between Paris and Vienna, mobile calls made using the technology that is dominant in Europe generally allowed passengers to connect to ground phones after a couple of tries. Calls made from the ground to the plane, though, tended to go directly to voice mail.
No comments:
Post a Comment