Turning phone off on flight

josip

Won't someone think of the mobile operators?

Years ago I forgot to turn off my phone and it was in my bag in the overhead locker. When we landed I had welcome messages from 5 different European countries, so even at 10,000m you were getting some signal. Not sure whether it was 2G/3G. I suspect that it was 2G and I don't know if the MNO (Mobile Network Operator) antennas are now sufficiently advanced that little of the signal leaks vertically and it's all focused horizontally.

This would have been back in the day when networks had much less capacity. At the time handover between mobile network cells were one of the big challenges. Most of the call drops people experienced at the time were when moving from one cell to another. (Soft) handovers between cells under the same area controller were somewhat reliable, but (hard) handovers between cells under different controllers took longer and were in the lap of the gods in the early days. The hardware and software had the capacity to handle a limited number per second. The last thing the operators wanted at the time was 100 people causing a soft handover every couple of minutes and then having to handle 100 hard handovers in the same second. Multiply that by the number of planes in the air over a country and you've got a lot of extra load on an MNO's network.

Things have moved on now and this is less of an issue, but I know that back then, the MNOs and equipment vendors were supportive of the mobile phone ban while airborne.