What are the technical requirements for airlines that wish to offer mobile services to passengers during flights?
Airlines need to install MCA equipment, which is being produced by several mobile equipment manufacturers. This consists of a “picocell” (a very small mobile base station or mobile “mast”) and a “Network Control Unit”. The Network Control Unit stops onboard phones trying to connect directly with land-based cellular networks, which are not designed to deal with high-speed movement. Until now, the potential disturbance to land-based mobile networks was one reason for prohibiting mobile phone use in planes. The other reason was the risk of high-power transmissions from mobile phones in aircraft interfering with on-board navigation and avionics equipment. This risk, already small, is made remote by the MCA service, which introduces a controlled environment inside the cabin forcing all mobiles to connect only to the MCA system. Mobile phones need to use much less power to connect to the base station that is only a few metres away and on board the aircraft itself, rather than a base station
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