A piece on the Register about the US regulator, the FCC, looking to release spectrum to for wireless backhaul (connectivity from the plane to the ground), for in-flight connectivity.
The FCC is looking to auction 500Mhz of bandwidth, starting at 14Ghz — by way of comparison, Vodafone in the UK holds about 160Mhz of spectrum in total, between 800Mhz and 2.6Ghz.
Neil,
ReplyDeleteThank you for the interesting post, both of the FCC and the UK spectrum comparisim.
I guess there is a factor for FCC looking into this, that it allows passengers to report emergency situations/ terrorist attacks on board (if any).. see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/22/fcc_natural_disaster_communications/
Ban
That's an interesting interpretation, Ban — perhaps one of the first times in recent history (ever?) that a government tries to tackle terrorism by increasing, rather than decreasing, communications capabilities!
ReplyDeleteI wonder how much of the overall traffic would be used for such a purpose, as opposed to comments on Facebook?!