The European Union announced that airplanes can now use the 5G network and there is no need to use Airplane Mode anymore.
Air travelers in the European Union will soon no longer need to put their smartphones in Airplane Mode during flights. The European Commission has announced in a new law that airlines can provide 5G communications to passengers.
According to the BBC report, the European Commission asked the member countries of this union to provide access to the 5G frequency band for airplanes by July 9, 1402. This means that users can use all the functions of their phone during the flight and, in addition to making calls, stream music and video from the Internet.
EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Burton says this program will help provide innovative services to users and help European companies grow even more. Since 2008, this union has reserved some specific frequency bands for airplanes and even provides internet in some places.
High-speed internet is available on airplanes
But the speed of this internet is very low and it takes help from satellites and ground stations to connect the user to the network. Now, in this new system, you can achieve the speed of 5G technology, which reaches 100 Mbps.
Dai Whittingham, director of the UK’s Aviation Safety Committee, says flight mode on phones has long been an important feature because we didn’t know enough about the effect of these devices on aircraft: “What we found is that the risk of [frequency] interference is very low.”
US regulators have had concerns about 5G frequencies interfering with aircraft. But Mr. Whittingham says this is not the case for the UK and the EU: “We have different frequencies for 5G and the power settings are lower than what is considered permissible in the US.”
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) first banned the use of cell phones on flights in 1991 to prevent the possibility of cell phone signals interfering with terrestrial cellular networks in the sky. The FCC again announced in 2017 that the reason for banning the use of mobile phones on flights is to prevent radio interference with mobile networks on the ground.
