From the above link:
Interesting stuff… in theory, this could come to Europe. Does it require special airborne equipment or do normal phones just work straight off?
I thought the speed at which the phone has to switch from cell to cell makes this very cumbersome.
A picture say more than a 1000 words 
Damn… I recognise her! (say no more – an expensive lesson 
)
I thought the speed at which the phone has to switch from cell to cell makes this very cumbersome.
I reckon what they are doing is installing a separate load of equipment on the ground which runs with a different protocol. Plus of course it uses special equipment airborne – not a standard GSM/GPRS/3G/UMTS/whatever radio.
If they do that, they can do what they want. There is nothing to say that 900/1800/1900/whatever MHz cannot run to aircraft at 30000ft doing 500kt. All sorts of stuff like maximum packet transit times will need to be tweaked…
Cell size is determined by the number of phones per cell, and the signal propagation characteristics, hence they are very small in urban areas and somewhat larger in the countryside. Telcos do not want to have more cells than necessary so they save costs.
I hazard a guess that the upwards-directed cells will be large given low density and only atmospheric attenuation to worry about, so cell-switching is unlikely to be an issue.
I also think Peter is right that this will be special hardware, the text mentions Honeywell building airborne kit – which is probably also what will fund the whole thing.
Cell size is determined by the number of phones per cell, and the signal propagation characteristics, hence they are very small in urban areas and somewhat larger in the countryside.
This so-called “cell breathing” effect is specific to CDMA-based protocols. 4G cell size is not affected by load (though data rate is). On the other hand, as far as I understand, handover between 4G cells is a much faster process than between 2G or 3G ones – at least the developers paid special attention to it.
You can have 4G connectivity already in flight. I wondered that my iPhone 5s started bleeping during a flight in FL160 over Aachen area. I forgot to turn off network, so it received and synced all emails.
It was showing LTE, so 4G
