Originally Posted by
eponymous_coward
There's relatively easy technical measures you can take to suppress VoIP/Skype (in layman's terms, you block certain types of network traffic like voice over IP while allowing things like web pages). Some airlines with WiFi do this, in fact.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/business/14essay.html
(Yes, you can defeat this. It's not the sort of thing that is trivial, though. You'd need some technical ability. And quite frankly, if someone is THAT desperate to Skype at 35,000 feet, let 'em and just have the flight attendants deal with them being loud and obnoxious.)
GoGo, the WiFi inflight carrier most USA carriers use, will be using Ka-band satellite within a few years (meaning the restriction on needing terrestrial antenna over land within range will go away soon):
http://www.gogoair.com/gogo/cms/technology.do
By all means, keep playing King Canute on the seashore and try to keep the digital tide from rushing into your airplanes, though...
This week I was on a FGW train heading into London and was in the empty 1st Quiet Carriage sitting quite happily reading a TR about a Blizzard and a long lounge stay
^. At one point a girl got on and stood in the vestibule area talking very loudly into her phone which was very annoying, especially as she appeared not to have a 1st ticket*. I was far from impressed and after visiting the gents opened the window the other side from her in the hope that she would get the message and p!ss off.
She didn't and I wondered what else I could do to get shot of her, I resorted to playing the Imperial March as loud as my laptop speakers would go and she eventually got the message that she was annoying me. She walked back past the buffet and was never seen again.
Last week I had a journey where I wasn't the only passenger and someone had decided that they would have their Android, BlackBerry and iPhone out and constantly receiving messages. I was being driven insane by these dings, pings and bleeps & the fact that the when he went for a walk one of the phones rang or an alarm went off and I was tempted to leave a note about it being a Quiet Carriage.
I suspect that if wifi is brought to BA planes there'll be all those little dings pings and bleeps to contend with as well as normal cabin noise.