[aklug] Re: wireless on airlines

On Thu, 12 Nov 2009, Jenkinson, John P (SAIC) wrote:

> it seems like airlines have two methods of providing customer wireless.
> satellite which is expensive to add to the plane, and cell based
> wireless which is cheaper, but not good for flying over water or wher
> cell based infrastructure is sparce.

I've never actually tried to get a cell signal in the air, but my guess is
you'd be lucky to get any signal at all from the air.

Generally speaking, the goal of the antenna coverage of a cell site is not
to reach out as far as possible which is usually the case with most radio
transmissions--it's actually to *limit* the footprint. Usually this is
done by angling the antennas down several degrees. With the antennas of
most cell sites angled down like that, you most likely wouldn't get any
usable signal from the air.

The reason for limiting the footprint is because the larger the footprint
of a single site, the more customer phones are going to 'register' with
that site at any given time. But you want your customers spread out
fairly uniformly over all your cell sites, so you start limiting the
footprint of your most heavily loaded sites, and then locating new sites
nearby.

Mike
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Received on Fri Nov 13 06:34:58 2009