Oh ffs… Okay, let’s get it through your pea sized brain. THE BASE STATION WOULD PROVIDE NO ACTUAL CONNECTIVITY. It is only there so the phones connect to it, and not a station outside the plane, during the times its dangerous for hundreds of phones to be constantly reconnecting to different stations.
To continue your WiFi analogy… imagine a WiFi router without the modem/WAN connection. It provides a local network to connect to, but no internet connectivity.
Except it does work - the base station simply needs to emulate the connectivity check servers. It doesn’t even need to do anything fancy, just route all packets to a locally running microserver that responds to ICMP Echo, HTTP and TCP requests and so on.
Governments already use this approach for blocking out areas (e.g. during protests) while also grabbing mobile phone IDs and other data, via mobile base stations. The exact same could be applied to the ~10 minutes of takeoff and landing time.
if they could get carriers onboard to sponsor the installation then maybe.
Oh ffs… Okay, let’s get it through your pea sized brain. THE BASE STATION WOULD PROVIDE NO ACTUAL CONNECTIVITY. It is only there so the phones connect to it, and not a station outside the plane, during the times its dangerous for hundreds of phones to be constantly reconnecting to different stations.
To continue your WiFi analogy… imagine a WiFi router without the modem/WAN connection. It provides a local network to connect to, but no internet connectivity.
The first part of that comment was unnecessary Fonix, you do not need to resort to name calling.
yeah that doesn’t work. if they can’t reach out from the base station they try picking another one. so it would make the problem way worse.
Except it does work - the base station simply needs to emulate the connectivity check servers. It doesn’t even need to do anything fancy, just route all packets to a locally running microserver that responds to ICMP Echo, HTTP and TCP requests and so on.
Governments already use this approach for blocking out areas (e.g. during protests) while also grabbing mobile phone IDs and other data, via mobile base stations. The exact same could be applied to the ~10 minutes of takeoff and landing time.
is it the same for 3G?
It’s the same for all generations.
Internet checks are easy to take with a simple HTTP+IGMP service. 2G/3G also did a slightly different connectivity check but that can be faked too.
Phones will try to route around a malfunctioning base station that is isolated from the internet.