Mobile's up in the air

Ofcom has published the outcome of its Mobile Communications on Board Aircraft (MCA) consultation which began last October and is now happy to issue license variations to UK-based aircraft operators to allow in-flight mobile services.

There were various concerns raised, including passenger safety and anti-social behaviour (“Hello, I’m on a plane!”) – both of which Ofcom considered to be outside its remit, as they are the responsibility of the Civil Aviation Authority and aircraft operators. It may help to reduce passenger stress, however, if the results of YouGov’s survey on behalf of The Post Office are to be believed: nine per cent of those surveyed said having their phone turned off makes them feel anxious.

From a technical point of view, at least three UK networks (plus an anonymous respondent) and the GSM Association raised questions about interference with existing terrestrial networks. As a plane is only in a specific location for a short period, it will be difficult to trace any loss or quality of service issues due to interference. Ofcom believes that this is manageable, and it should be possible to trace a particular aircraft if interference is caused.

The document also gives an insight into the proposed service. It will work on 1800MHz only (which shouldn’t cause a problem nowadays as GSM900-only or GSM900/1900 dual banders are rare), and involve roaming onto a new non-geographic network. Wi-Fi was also mentioned, though as this uses unregulated frequencies at low powers, it doesn’t need Ofcom’s go-ahead. This could open the way to VoIP services from laptops as competition to MCA.

Flying Wi-Fi users will also be pleased British Airways (BA) is giving free hotspot access to business lounge users at Heathrow. As BA’s major hub, and as BA is Heathrow’s biggest carrier, it’s surprising this has taken so long. Scandinavian Airlines has had this free facility in its lounge at Terminal 3 for around a year. It would, perhaps, be a little unkind to suggest BA’s T5 customers will have ample opportunity to use this new facility.

But while Wi-Fi hotspots are useful, a report from Infonetics Research entitled Mobility: Broadband, Phones, Subscribers, and Services claims their days may be numbered. The cause? Rapid uptake in mobile broadband devices.

Infonetics forecasts sales will quadruple by 2011, mainly on the back of mobile data services becoming far more cost effective. With a budget of £15 a month you now have a choice of services, each with a reasonable amount of inclusive data – something that cost three times as much just a couple of years ago.

With the works-anywhere convenience of a USB modem compared to searching out a Wi-Fi hotspot, the business model for Wi-Fi is looking less sustainable – at least as far as regular users is concerned.

Keep on keepin’ on

Remember when phone standby times were measured in hours, then a leap in technology gave us handsets which could go for days? Well, apparently the Chinese have outsmarted the big mobile manufactures and are selling handsets with a claimed battery life of almost two years!

The Jiaxin W668 dual sim 900/1800MHz GSM phone manages 400 days standby, four days talk time and features a colour touchscreen, MP3/4 player and dual cameras. Even this is eclipsed by the I-Coloured Mobile ZJ268, which has similar specifications but manages 666 days of standby or up to five days of talk time.

How? The most obvious part is the use of huge capacity batteries: the ZJ268 has a whopping 32800 mAH Lithium battery, which at 87x51x10 mm and 120 grammes is also the size of an average handset on its own. That is roughly 30 times the capacity of an average battery, so you’d expect it to last a while – though I’d also expect the claimed 666 days to drop drastically if you actually use it.

Chinese based websites such as solomobi.com have entire sections dedicated to long standby handsets – this is clearly becoming a must-have feature over there.

Plenty of white space

In the US, the White Space Coalition is working on a new method of providing high speed wireless broadband.

‘White space’ is the empty frequencies between analogue television transmissions – space becoming more available with the conversion to digital.

Big players like Google, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and Dell are all hoping to persuade the FCC their plans wont cause interference to other users.

The TV bands are of particular interest as they are relatively low frequency, so can be used for fairly long range transmissions – and they have lots of bandwidth available.

The technology proposed is pretty clever, including beacons monitoring a channel for existing signals and dynamic access to a database of available channels; so as you roam around you won’t accidentally block out a transmitter.

Of course Google sees a future where its Android platform can communicate without involving those bothersome mobile networks; and the white space plan is getting more attention following Google’s failure to license a 700MHz spectrum block earlier this year.