More and more airlines are allowing you to use your mobiles now how high would you have to be before you lost the ground signal?
by 
oldmanuk
ANSWERS: 2
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I just heard the other day, that the FAA and Government voted not to allow cell phones in flight, they could interfere with the controls.
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Very high indeed, from sheer height. In poorly populated areas, some of the "cells" are fifty miles across, so that you can be 20 miles from the mast if there are no hills in the way. Planes don't fly 20 miles up. The main problem is that you are inside a mostly metal tube, and mobile signals cannot go through metal, so you will only get reception if the mast is, roughly speaking, visible through the window. The biggest problem with mobiles on aircraft is actually for the phone company. The system expects you to be on the ground, and therefore closer to one mast than to the others, or at most equidistant between two. But a plane flying over a city, where the "masts" are only a few hundred yards apart, is equidistant from tens or dozens of masts. The software trying to decide which mast you should talk to gets very confused.
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