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[–] 56 points 5 months ago* (30 children)

I'm surprised airplane mode is still a thing. It doesn't matter for the purpose it was created, and letting users disconnect with a single toggle goes against the modern capitalist surveillance state. I guess it'd save battery since your phone wouldn't be trying to connect to a new cell tower every few seconds?

Then again, on my Android tablet the mode doesn't even disable the radios anymore. I can still use WiFi and Bluetooth just fine with it enabled. I'm not sure what airplane mode actually does these days.

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  • [–] 44 points 5 months ago (23 children)

    It can cause issues on the ground as hundreds of phones try to connect to many overlapping cell towers at 800km/h.

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  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago (18 children)

    Put a base station on the aircraft, all phones can connect to it at low power.

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  • [–] 15 points 5 months ago (17 children)
  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (16 children)

    That's already a thing, I'm talking about putting a 4g/5g/6g base station on an aircraft.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago* (15 children)

    with the prices they charge for the wifi, what do you think would happen to ticket costs if they added a 5G transciever?

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago (9 children)

    The point isn't to provide 5G but to reduce devices reaching outside the plane for connection...

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (8 children)

    if they could get carriers onboard to sponsor the installation then maybe.

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  • [+] -3 points 5 months ago (7 children)
  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (3 children)

    It’s funny you think it would increase costs. It’s parts and bandwidth. GBs for cents.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    it would increase costs because that's what airlines do whenever they get a new gadget.

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Wifi, bluetooth, and cell signal all use different antennae and serve very different purposes.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    It's a tablet that doesn't have cell coverage. As far as I can tell no form of connectivity it offers is blocked in airplane mode. I guess it's only there because base Android includes the toggle?

    And in older versions it was a proper killswitch for radios. My previous phones couldn't use any connectivity with it enabled.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Yea it definitely used to be. I remember having to turn bluetooth back on to use some headphones.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    They changed it at some point and added a toggle for "sensors" (at least on my android phone) that is different than the airplane mode toggle.

    My best guess is this is because of accessories like Bluetooth headphones and services like inflight wifi and the need to turn back on those toggles causing some friction or confusion that makes people toggle off airplane mode which I believe breaks federal law in some countries.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago

    For what it’s worth the β€œkill all radios” button has existed longer than we have called it airplane mode. My Pocket PC had a switch on the side, not totally unlike the iPhone silent switch but you had to move it with the stylus.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    I'm surprised too, since last time i've travelled by plane, if i recall it correctly, all passengers were asked to turn off their devices and there was nothing like "enable airplane mode". But it's only for taking off and landing. Maybe it's different in different countries. Maybe my memory is hallucinating tho But i do have some questions about this mode and why it's still called like this, not some other way. Well, your case just makes a good example of how outdated some things' naming is.

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