[packetwerks]

In 1999 I was on a flight and sat next to an EE who worked for Boeing on commercial airliners. He said that there was virtually no chance that a cell phone would cause any interference. He said that as far as he could tell the FAA rules stemmed from the FCC that stemmed from the cell carries pressuring the FCC not to allow it. The reason he suggested was that cell phones at altitude have line-of-sight to dozens of cell towers. As airplanes full of cell phones fly through the air they associate and disassociate with cell towers very quickly. The towers have to switch the handsets from tower to tower more quickly than usual causing a lot of network traffic signaling overhead between cell sites. Here's a wikipedia article on this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_on_aircraft#Cell_...

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