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Flight phones - another chapter, but still no resolution as Germany considers allowing in-flight calls

German magazine Focus says that Germany is going to lift its ban on cellphone use in-flight. That's the second shoe falling: the first, of course, was the announcement by OnAir of a technology which makes the mobile carriers happy.

The laws and regulations, however, have to change as well as the OnAir type technology; and it seems that this is happening.

According to Mike Slocombe's report on Digital Lifestyles, this isn't just an airline move, but a statement from the German Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Housing, saying that it will be lifting its ban on the use of mobile phones on commercial flights.

The Register's Jan Libbenga quotes the German Aerospace Centre as saying no more than the phone signals won't interfere with in-flight electronics.

Most of this is acknowledgement of the inevitable. Once OnAir had developed the technique of producing a pico-cell inside the plane, the real danger of cellphones on planes was eliminated. That danger is that one active phone in the air could cause real chaos to the networks on the ground, or force all mobile networks to upgrade their software to cope.

There are perception issues, of course. IDC produced a sincere, if utterly misguided, piece of research last month, which purported to show that there would be real opposition to the use of phones in the air for voice calls, saying that fliers were concerned with "the potential [that] in-flight usage would create disturbances to passengers."

In fact, the overall noise level on a plane  - as anybody who has been to the airport knows, never mind frequent fliers - makes it virtually impossible to hear someone just two rows behind you, even if they are shouting.

Experience with airphone technology, using phones built into the seats, shows that you can't tell whether the passenger on the other side of the plane is talking into it, or just moving their lips in curses at the poor quality of the audio. The most plausible scenario is that, in the early days of in-flight mobiles, passengers might be asked to switch to 'vibrate' rather than 'ring' when the lights go out. It will, probably, be as successful as requests to cinema audiences have been...

Slocombe's report on  Digital Lifestyles.
Libbenga's analysis on the  Register
OnAir gets go-ahead -  NewsWireless report, with links.
IDC's utterly misguided  research.