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I once forgot to put my cell phone in airplane mode during a flight from London to SFO (and didn't use my phone during the flight). I was rather alarmed to see
by madrox 4y ago
I once forgot to put my cell phone in airplane mode during a flight from London to SFO (and didn't use my phone during the flight). I was rather alarmed to see a flood of text messages from my carrier welcoming me to Iceland, Canada, and the US upon my landing.
- capableweb 4y agoThat sounds... Improbable. When you were passing over Iceland you must have been far too far above the antennas to receive any sort of signal, unless it landed there on the way across the ocean?
- mtnGoat 4y agoDefinitely possible, 100%. Can confirm getting texts at 25k feet while not in airplane mode. I was on a flight from JFK->SEA and got welcome to Canada texts above Toronto area.
- mmmpop 4y agoI too have gotten similar sorts of texts on my last trans-Atlantic flight from DIA to Frankfurt.
- rootusrootus 4y agoCan't speak for Iceland specifically, but can confirm that if you fly from Seattle or Portland down to SFO, you follow a corridor of fairly strong mobile coverage most all the way, and it's occasionally usable at cruising altitude for a moment here and there. Definitely enough to get text messages.
- margalabargala 4y agoThis is in fact the real reason that we still have the airplane mode restriction. A phone at cruising altitude can see and try to connect to a huge number of cell towers at once. Like, orders of magnitude more towers than it would be able to see even from the top of a mountain. Plus, you're constantly disconnecting from some towers and connecting to new ones. This puts a strain on the cell network systems. One person won't have a negative impact but then you multiply the problem by the number of people who fly daily.
- Retric 4y agoBeing 6 miles up and 8 miles horizontally is only 10 miles from a cellphone tower. As rural cells can easily be more than 20 miles this seems reasonable.
- EvanAnderson 4y agoI would think the antennas on cell towers are polarized to limit radiated power up.
- mrelectric 4y agoThey are.
- Retric 4y agoWould that do much for multi path bounces etc?
- mrelectric 4y agoDepends on the base station. We usually point them down and try to adjust the power output not to "spray" the signal all over the place but rather be focused (and save operator costs), however some stations are set on max power and a lot can bounce away, indeed.
- tengwar2 4y agoNot so much polarised as aimed. I'm not familiar with 5G (which I believe uses phased array beam aiming), but earlier generations had provision to physically tilt aerials in the vertical plane to optimise beam direction.
- smileysteve 4y agoCurvature of the earth means that an airplane may be horizontal at 20+ miles out, while a surface vehicle is blocked by ground.
- throwbigdata 4y agoA long time ago when we found out that iPhones were keeping track of where you went, I learned that my phone had associated with some Russian cell towers when I flew over Russia flying from Newark to India, or somewhere like that. It’s highly probable.
- kshacker 4y agoI have received messages over Russia (traveling from US to India, 2-3 years back). And I received from one more country that I do not recall. It happens.
- madrox 4y agoI was as surprised as you. We did not land. I do not have an explanation.
- ungamedplayer 4y agoThis also happens passing over Sydney to Auckland from Singapore.
- adamparsons 4y agoYep, flying Sydney to Perth occasionally passes over Adelaide and I’ll notice my phone change Timezone to Adelaide and get a notification or two come through
- johnwalkr 4y agoI have AirTags in a case that is shipped by air a lot (without me being on the same flights) and once I got an updated location in midflight.
- Sakos 4y agoThe bandwidth required for the initial handshake is very, very, very low. I'm not surprised that in areas with strong enough networks (especially considering there's no visual obstruction towards the skies) that a portion of the connection process would succeed, but it wouldn't be sufficient for anything else (thus the welcome SMSs only arriving far later).
- NegativeLatency 4y agoHad the same happen a couple of times on flights to Alaska from the US west coast. Surprised to see messages from Bell Canada
- sowbug 4y agoThis happens to me, too, particularly when I fly in Asia. I collect screenshots of notifications welcoming me to countries I've never been to.