FCC Nixes Airline Cellular, Approves WiFi

According to the FCC ruling, cell phone providers failed to "provide insufficient technical information on whether the use of cellular phones onboard aircraft may cause harmful interference to terrestrial networks."

In a piece by Grant Gross, however, the real motivator behind the FCC’s decision is brought to light:

After the FCC opened the inquiry in December 2004, the agency received thousands of comments from airline customers asking it not to approve mobile phone calls during flights. Many people said they didn’t want to be subjected to their neighbors’ phone conversations.

So while the FCC is standing by its technical defense for continuing the ban on in-flight cellular conversations, evidence indicates that the decision is based more on the issue of passenger convenience rather than technological viability.

This is especially apparent given the fact that the airlines are allowing WiFi technology aboard flights, and already have deals in place to implement cellular service:

The FCC has already auctioned off radio spectrum for cellphone use on airplanes, and telecommunications companies partnering with airlines have successfully tested several systems. But no company made a firm proposal. Facing high costs and opposition from fliers, U.S. airline customers weren’t interested. Yet with airlines in Europe and the Middle East to begin offering cellphone service aboard airplanes later this year, that could change.

VoIP access, however, will be disabled for in-flight WiFi, lending further credence to the theory that the FCC is siding with airline passengers who don’t want to be bothered with nearby phone conversations.

If in-flight cellular is successful in Europe and other countries abroad, however, look for the FCC to reevaluate its stance on the issue.

Britain’s own BBC has had these shows around for decades and now they are making special offers for the fans through their mobile phones. They’ve teamed with ROK Player, a cell phone content company to sell special memory card known as digital video chips (DVC), which can be inserted into compatible equipment. The DVC will carry one episode of the good Dr. and three episodes of “Red Dwarf”. It will be available in Nokia stores and at ROK Player’s site. The initial BBC offering includes the classic Doctor Who special “The Five Doctors” and three episodes from Red Dwarf; “Marooned” (Series III), “Quarantine” (Series V), “Cassandra” (Series VIII).

“BBC Worldwide is always looking for new opportunities, both in the UK and abroad, that allow consumers to enjoy their favourite TV content again and again, while delivering additional revenues to the BBC and to the talent behind the classic programming. The ROK Player meets these demands, delivering high quality full-length episodes to mobile phones on a commercial basis,” said Marc Humphrey, Business Development Manager, BBC Worldwide.

This process is based on a tiny little chip called a digital video chip ROK Player is working on. They’ve got the patent pending now in the U.K. and no word on the U.S. status.

Unfortunately for us Yanks, these won’t be available here just yet. The price for the chip will be 17 pounds. They’ve also got a number of movies already in the can including “Shawshank Redemption”. No word on whether the Dalek Emperor will receive an advance copy.

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Proposals pushed by Boeing unit Connexion and other prospective in-flight cellular providers shouldn’t get off the ground, according to a USA Today report.

In a June 8 letter to the FAA, Cingular suggested that the existing ban on in-flight cellphone calls should be kept intact. “We believe there is a time and a place for wireless phone conversations, and seldom does that include the confines of an airplane flight.”

It’s an interesting position for Cingular to take. One would expect the company to be in favor of a proposal that would add to its revenues. But a spokesperson for Cingular said the company was responding to concerns from its customers.

The FCC has similar proposals to consider, and that agency’s focus would be on how airborne cellular traffic might interfere with ground-based customers. Cingular and Verizon jointly submitted comments to the FCC on the issue.

In those comments, the two providers said they would support lifting the ban if the interference issue could be resolved. But the FAA’s focus is one safety as a “top priority.”

The existing ban on cellphones comes from a concern that they could interfere with the electronic operations of an airplane. However, due to the lack of privacy on an airplane, there may not be a great demand for cellphone use in-flight.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, and Vodafone, have had the Japanese market to themselves for quite a while.

But the result of a later-dropped lawsuit from Yahoo’s broadband partner Softbank has led to the drafting of new legislation by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, according to AFP.

The Ministry regulation will dictate that the government gives priority to new entrants to the Japanese mobile phone market when it allocates frequency spectrum later this year.

That allocation of the high-speed 800MHz band will let companies provide third generation services like e-mail, video, and other profitable downloadable content.

Already fierce competition will become even moreso, not only due to new entrants into the market. Next year, customers will have access to wireless number portability. That will let a customer keep a phone number, but change wireless providers.

Wireless number portability was recently enabled in the United States, and should be a feature available to Canadians in the near future.

The change to the Japanese competitive landscape will be the first in twelve years. Currently, the three providers have been undercutting each other with discounts on various service charges.

NTT still reigns as the top provider of land-line services in the country, even after its monopoly on telecom services was broken. KDDI has been challenging NTT’s DoCoMo service, with offerings like a free mobile-updated weblog for subscribers.

Called DuoBlog, the service will be a first among the three providers, as KDDI seeks to continue eating into DoCoMo’s lead.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Clips from “All That Jazz” and other popular tunes from Broadway productions have made their way onto phones from Sprint.

Music from shows like “The Producers,” “Chicago,” and “Wicked” have become available as ringtones, some exclusive to Sprint while others are available from other providers.

Downloadable content has become a massive revenue stream for wireless providers like Sprint. With a charge of $2.50 per selection, ringtones cost more than an entire song download from a site like iTunes.

With new handsets capable of greater storage capacity via built-in flash memory and even miniature hard drives, users will be able to download and keep even more content. And music companies will do their best to promote ringtones and similar content to take advantage of this new revenue stream.

Sprint’s effort pairs it with Live Broadway, and the wireless provider has been a supporter of Broadway for quite some time.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Cingular, which purchased AT&T Wireless last fall, had not been a major player in the prepaid cellular service sector.

But that has changed, and Cingular plans to market its service heavily, particularly to teenagers. Anyone cost-conscious about cellular usage will be a secondary focus of the marketing scheme.

Prepaid plans notoriously have been high in customer turnover, or churn. It costs more to get prepaid customers and more to keep them as customers.

“The big issue in prepaid is churn. If you price it attractively and give people real alternatives in terms of devices and flexibility that gives them reason to stay,” said Cingular spokesman Mark Siegel.

Cingular’s plan will let customers use prepaid services on any of its phones. This is a big difference when compared to other providers who limit prepaid users to certain cellphones.

One motivating factor may be competitor Nextel’s recent announcement that its prepaid service, Boost Mobile, finally made an operating profit in the first quarter of 2005. The growth potential of the sector may be ready to pay off for the likes of Cingular.

Cingular will offer plans ranging from $29.99 to $69.99 per month. A pay as you go option similar to Virgin Mobile’s plan will be available as well.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Sanswire hopes their innovation can revolutionize the way broadband and cellular signals are delivered to a specific area. According to Reuters:

When finished, the 245-foot-long (75-meter), robot-piloted, solar-powered airship will resemble a double-tailed whale.

Flying above the jet stream but lower than a satellite — and one-tenth the cost at $25 million to $30 million — the Stratellite also would render land-based cell-phone towers obsolete, its makers say.

A description of the Stratellite, provided by Sanswire, reveals more about their innovation:

A Stratellite is a high-altitude airship that when in place in the stratosphere will provide a stationary platform for transmitting various types of wireless communications services currently transmitted from cell towers and satellites. It is not a balloon or a blimp. It is a high-altitude airship.

A Stratellite will have a payload capacity of several thousand pounds and clear line-of-sight to approximately 300,000 square miles, an area roughly the size of Texas.

When it comes time for implementation, Sanswire foresees having stratellites in place over each major city in the US. The company is looking to conduct a test flights for the Stratellite during this upcoming summer.

Reuters also offers a quote from GlobeTel, the parent company of Sanswire, explaining their goal for the communications airship:

“We’re shooting for satellite replacement at a lower cost,” said Leigh Coleman, president of Sanswire parent GlobeTel Communications Corp. “We believe this will change the way you communicate.”

Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest search news.

What do all those acronyms mean? Most are specific ways of transmitting what amounts to the same kind of signals. Different phones depend on different technologies, and many of these are manufacturer-dependent.

Let’s clear the air and take a quick look at some acronyms you’re likely to encounter, and what they mean:

If you have an analog cell phone, chances are good you’re using AMPS. That stands for Advanced Mobile Phone Service, the analog phone service used in North and South America. It describes a service that uses the FDMA technology to allow cell phone communications.

While your analog phone may use an AMPS service, your phone is communicating using FDMA. This stands for Frequency Division Multiple Access. It’s an analog transmission technology for cell phone communications. AMPS is the network, while FDMA is the way signals are transmitted.

If your phone is digital, it just might communicate using TDMA. TDMA stands for Time Division Multiple Access. This transmission technology creates a high-speed channel by combining multiple channels into one. It’s digital and it offers three times the apacity of FDMA.

Do you have a QUALCOMM phone? If so, it’s likely that it’s using CDMA to send out its information. CDMA stands for Code Division Multiple Access. CDMA is another digital transmission technology, used by QUALCOMM phones. CDMA is known for its high-quality calls and the long battery life of phones supporting it. It’s an inexpensive technology to put into place and it offers ten times the capacity of analog phone systems. CDMA is used by the military for secure communications – it’s difficult to tap into or jam calls made using CDMA.

An early cellular network in Europe that has since spread to other continents is GSM. GSM stands for Global System Mobile Communications (well, almost – the “C” didn’t make it into the acronym). GSM is a digital service, and it employs the TDMA transmission technology. GSM was originally deployed in Europe but now it’s used in the US, too, on a different frequency. In 2000, about half of the world’s phone users (250 million) were using GSM.

GSM is probably best known for its support of text messaging, letting you type in short phrases and emoticons (up to 160 characters) to send to your friends (who must also have GSM phones). GSM phones also support SIMs. SIM stands for Subscriber Identity Module. SIMs are smart cards that make it possible to borrow phones and program them instantly by hooking them up to your SIM. The cards themselves can be programmed to offer custom menus that follow you around, regardless of what phone you use.

Phones that support messaging are using SMS. That’s the acronym for Short Messaging Service – a text-messaging service supported by GSM networks, allowing users to send messages of 140 to 160 characters. SMS messages are stored at a centrally located site and then forwarded to recipients.

If you’re able to download files using your phone, then you might be using a GPRS service. GPRS stands for General Packet Radio Service. GPRS is essentially GSM with Web support. It supports the TCP/IP protocol and allows both Web browsing and file transfer from cell phones.

An improved and relatively new version of GSM is EDGE. That means Enhanced Data rates for Global Evolution, which is a higher capacity version of GSM and TDMA.

You’ve probably never used a device operating on UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System), because it’s a technology still on the horizon. It’s a European standard and represents the next step in the evolution of GSM. One day, users will be able to access UMTS networks operating at 2 Mbps. In themeantime, EDGE and GPRS are intermediate steps on the way to UMTS.

When you drive from Seattle to San Francisco and talk on your phone along the way, that’s IS-41 at work. That acronym means Interim Standard 41, a cellular protocol that passes cellular user information from one carrier to another as a user travels between locations in North America. IS-41 is the protocol that allows you to keep chatting on your phone while traveling.

Get your email on your Palm? That’s CDPD, or Cellular Digital Packet Data. It’s a store and forward method (not a direct connection, in other words) of wireless access. It’s based on AMPS, the analog wireless cellular network, but adds IP support. Most urban areas have CDPD support, and several large telephone companies (AT&T, GTE, Ameritech, etc.) have deployed it. CDPD is used to support wireless communications on laptops, PDAs, and other mobile devices.

WAP is the Wireless Application Protocol, which is a protocol that lets you surf the Web and check your email on a variety of devices (so long as everything is text-based). Pagers, cell phones, and other mobile devices use WAP to communicate. When someone pages you, that’s WAP in action.

The menu that you use on your WAP devices is written in WML, or Wireless Markup Language. This is language of WAP devices. When you view menus on pagers or other WAP devices, they’re written in WML, which is a type of XML document developed using XML and HTML tools.

A name that’s in the news a lot where wireless technology is mentioned is NTT DoCoMo. “DoCoMo” is Japanese for “anywhere,” and it’s the cellular company that provides Japan with wireless services – from satellite communications to cell phones and paging.

And if you’ve heard of NTT DoCoMo, you’ve probably heard of i-Mode. i-Mode is an information service provided by NTT DoCoMo for Japan. i-Mode offers its 20 million plus subscribers an almost limitless variety of options for their cell phones. Calendaring, chat, news, games – just about anything available from other cell phone services and the Web is available for i-Mode devices. While its initial throughput was at 9600 bps, speeds have improved and the network now runs at 384 Kbps.

For American users, now there’s m-Mode. AT&T Wireless is offering m-Mode service as an American parallel to Japan’s i-Mode. Much like i-Mode, m-Mode offers real-time access to content you’d expect to find on the Web, all on your cell phone. At the moment, m-Mode is only available in limited areas as it is a relatively new technology.

Because the Japanese began their Internet experience through cell phones, it’s uncertain how m-Mode will fare in the US. Americans expect more from the Internet since most Americans began using the Internet on computers with large screens and keyboards. It’s hard to say if the wireless freedom will outweigh the inconvenience of using such a small device.

There are many, many more acronyms associated with cellular technology. Further muddying the cellular waters are other technologies used by wireless computer networks, some of which overlap with cell phones, and others that are device-specific. Know the ones listed here and you’ll be on your way to understanding the important advances in wireless technology.

http://www.attws.com/mmode/

http://www.techweb.com/

http://www.webopedia.com/

Jackie Rosenberger is an editor with iEntry, Inc.