Recentingly, in another thread, cell phones and planes came up. I
thought others might be interested in these links.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1568024,00.asp
http://wirelesscabin.com/
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...art.html?pg=12

The general theory on modern cell phones in flight, goes like this:
The FCC also has a ban because when you're in flight, you're always at
least 6-8 miles away from the nearest cell tower. You end up communicating
with too many towers and bogging down the network. One or two such calls
is tolerable, but a whole plane load moving through would disrupt the
ground-based users of the network. Remember, the farther you are from a
tower, the more power your cell phone uses to communicate with it's tower;
up to 5-watts. Worse, a plane full of 5-watt transmitters causes
terrestrial interference problems for the land cell users, in a large
radius around the plane.

This picocell concept (covered the above links) solves both problems by
moving the nearest cell tower to just a few feet away from the phone.
Therefore, the phone kicks into its lowest power tx setting,
and never talks to any other tower. Of course, I don't think you can
expect on in a small GA plane anytime soon.

I also found a quote that went like this:
"The restriction against cell phones is an FCC regulation and applies to
all aircraft that can fly over a certain speed (maybe 200 kts?). Quickly
switching cells during high speed flight causes all sorts of problems on
the cell network."

Can anyone confirm such an FCC regulation as it relates to airspeed? I
must admit, from I understand of the subject, it does make sense. Just
the same, confirmation would be great.

Lastly, can anyone confirm first hand accounts of cell phones actually
causing some type, instrumentation or radio interference?

At worst, hopefully this will be some food for thought.

Thanks! Cheers!