Link: Qantas trials airborne SMS, bans voice calls | NEWS.com.au
Qantas is about to start a three-month trial on a Boeing 767.
Passengers will be able to send and receive SMS messages and emails, but voice calls will be banned.Virgin Blue may soon follow, with the airline indicating the idea was being considered.
A Qantas spokesman said the 767 would be fitted with technology to effectively convert the aircraft into a mini-country in the sky, enabling passengers to use their phones.
Mobiles will need to be converted to international roaming and the cost of text messages and emails will depend on the carrier.
It’ll be interesting to see if it gets much in the way of usage beyond ‘Hey, I’m in the plane’ style text messages.
Will people want to continue conversations at 50p a text while they’re in the plane?
Sure. 😉 Course they will. Just, not me. I’d much prefer email and would probably have a real problem paying 50p for a text unless I felt it was totally necessary.
Makes a mockery of all that ‘please put your phones off lest they interfere with our navigational equipment’ doesn’t it…
Personally I like to turn off from work once in a while and flights are great for eating a pile of plastic food, watching a naff film and that same bloody episode of Extras that I’ve now seen 12 times, oh and chatting to the nice girly next to me…which with my luck is usually a dullard bloke and his even more boring wife who want to tell me the whole damn experience of how they got their holiday for £20 less than everyone else by sitting up at 3am and watching teletext pages scroll by…oh god no, now he’s telling me about last years holiday and how the food was “all foreign”…
…actually where is my phone, I’ve suddenly realised the office can’t cope without me…
steve
You’re right – if phones on planes really did interfere with the instrumentation they’d be banned -although apparently they do have an impact on the infrastructure on the ground.
I’ve been trying to get a couple of airlines to text their customers when they get on the plane to tell to switch their phone off. If the message expiry is less than the duration of the flight and they HAVE switched off, the passenger will never get the message. And if they’ve left their phone on, they’ll be embarassed into switching it off.