Nokia acquired Alcatel Lucent and provide the ground stations for this system
Peter wrote:
But nobody will do that (even if it worked on airliners) because if it works with normal phones and normal contracts it will not generate the revenue!
They can always cut off the normal contracts or use roaming rates even if they were to use a compatible technology. Question is how EU regulation around mobile networks plays with this.
Peter wrote:
which enables usage metering and billing at a “different” rate.
You can accomplish this at the network end. The extra equipment makes perfect sense for an airliner or even business jet. Phones aren’t designed for this and the solution with an on-board cell is simple enough. I would want an external antenna anyway and modern phones can’t make use of it directly (cars have a solution for this but you’d need more than just an ordinary antenna). I imagine you could have an ADL-like box you could connect to the antenna and it would give you Internet connection via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. For a reasonable cost. No need to have a full blown pico-cell. And I wouldn’t want one anyway, both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are preferable for me, I don’t really need traditional voice service.
what_next wrote:
As I understand it, the end user phones will not connect directly with those upward facing LTE cells. Hopefully at least… as if flying as passenger is not bad enough already, soon one will be forced to listen to the conversations of a dozen people sitting around oneself, none of which is more than one metre away.
It’s likely an airliner will have its own cell unless they decide to offer Wi-Fi only (which could still support VOIP). So the phones will work.
Peter wrote:
The problem with all this is that the pricing will be set to extract max revenue, without regard for who can use it best.
Well, deploying such a network isn’t cheap and I believe they (Alcatel-Lucent about a year ago) were talking about 50 % saving compared to satelite-only solution, so still expensive (although I don’t recall which satelite service they used as baseline, there are huge differences). I imagine the billing to passengers will be per flight basis, no monthly contracts or anything like that. Most people don’t fly that often so it won’t hit them hard.
I think the biggest market by far is people sitting in airliners and you would not get 4G working at FL350 which is say 6-20 miles from the tower, hence the special equipment requirement. The airlines will take a cold look at whether their commission (or extra passengers) will make it worth their while. In the US Boeing abandoned one such scheme some years ago, but it was quite expensive to use.
If one was doing it for GA:
IIRC, there were/ are projects utilizing terrestrial networks in the US (Gogo comes to mind). It always requires equipment in the aircraft. I believe Alcatel-Lucent is developing something like this combining terrestrial (LTE based) and satelite (Europasat) networks, they should be deploying it around Europe by now. These systems are always aimed at airlines and business jet operators. I don’t think any of them will use frequencies supported by mobile phones. The Alcatel-Lucent project uses S band for the ground stations as well IIRC. Only a few LTE bands are in S band (some have one foot in S band) and not all of them are supported by mobile phones currently on the market. Putting aside the little detail that mobile phones were not designed to do this. And frankly, I’m not comfortable doing this without an external antenna.
Yes, though it depends on what you actually want.
It is a very obvious fact, at my “low” altitudes of say SFC-FL200, that where there is 4G/LTE I get data fine. It works great for short stuff e.g. using the telegram wx service from the autorouter wx server (“wx egka egkb eghh lfga” etc) – there is a wiki somewhere. If @achimha ever comes back from his self imposed exile 
he will post it no doubt.
It even works for stuff which is a few hundred k e.g. IR images, emails, etc. That’s because 4G does the DHCP in a fraction of a second (10x faster than 3G/HSPA) and the data is fast anyway – a few megabits/sec.
I almost never use the Thuraya satphone anymore, because I almost always can get connectivity for just long enough, a few times on say a 3hr flight. But I still carry it. For example there is IME absolutely zero data over the whole of Belgium.
It won’t work for stuff needing say 10-20 secs e.g. voice calls or longer internet sessions like uploading a 10MB photo to EuroGA while you are at FL100 unless you are lucky.
But if they put in enough 4G towers and had them pointing upwards, it would IMHO work.
But nobody will do that (even if it worked on airliners) because if it works with normal phones and normal contracts it will not generate the revenue!
So the only way to make money out of it is to make it need extra equipment, which enables usage metering and billing at a “different” rate.
IIRC, there were/ are projects utilizing terrestrial networks in the US (Gogo comes to mind). It always requires equipment in the aircraft. I believe Alcatel-Lucent is developing something like this combining terrestrial (LTE based) and satelite (Europasat) networks, they should be deploying it around Europe by now. These systems are always aimed at airlines and business jet operators. I don’t think any of them will use frequencies supported by mobile phones. The Alcatel-Lucent project uses S band for the ground stations as well IIRC. Only a few LTE bands are in S band (some have one foot in S band) and not all of them are supported by mobile phones currently on the market. Putting aside the little detail that mobile phones were not designed to do this. And frankly, I’m not comfortable doing this without an external antenna.
The problem with all this is that the pricing will be set to extract max revenue, without regard for who can use it best. That is how all of business runs and the shareholders would not have it any other way.
For sure it won’t be included in your 3GB data allowance in your £13/month Vodafone contract 
Peter wrote:
Didn’t Boeing close down a similar venture recently (implemented over a satcomms link)?
In the US, they are building up similar ground-to-air LTE networks. I just posted these links 10 days ago on the PPL/IR forum:
http://www.wireless-mag.com/News/38232/alcatel-lucent-signs-ground-to-air-lte-deal-with-deutsche-telekom-.aspx
http://www.futuretravelexperience.com/2014/05/att-enter-flight-connectivity-market-4g-lte-based-service/
Actually I see now that one of the links is about Europe… It wasn’t the one I had in mind.
That discussion was about using these antennae as a backup to GPS for navigation though.
Some more press announcements on this new system – European Aviation Network today, reporting successful test flights.
This new pan European wireless data network for aviation complements satellite broadband with adapted 4G LTE from 300 groundstations to provide higher speeds/lower total cost to fast moving aircraft in the continent. The press photos include an executive jet.
The system uses modified LTE from existing cellsites, using a different frequency and adapted to cope with fast moving aircraft and resulting higher doppler shift.
So this will require some specialist equipment to be fitted rather than just your standard smartphone or tablet. But I wonder if in future portable receivers might be possible for GA in a similar way they have been for satellite solutions, say for a few hundred pounds but with lower subscription and data usage fees.
It’s joint venture between Deutsche Telekom and Inmarsat with key suppliers Thales and Nokia, the system is scheduled to be commercial during 2017, starting with IAG group (BA, Iberia, Aer Lingus, Veuling) with Wi-Fi onboard their 320 fleet.
Youtube marketing video with diagrams explaining the system
Main website for EAN
DT press release
DT announce first customer of IAG
I was using “GSM” generically. You should get GPRS over it, say 20kbits/sec. If there is no GPRS you can usually do the 9.6k dial-up GSM is still used for voice and SMS although I think some of it goes via 3G/4G if available.
I am amazed that this new venture can make money, after installing all that extra hardware, just selling bandwidth to airliners. Didn’t Boeing close down a similar venture recently (implemented over a satcomms link)?
