Communication onboard aircraft

Francois CourauETSI MSG Chairman

DOCUMENT #: GSC13-GRSC6-07

FOR: Information

SOURCE: ETSI

AGENDA ITEM: 5.6

CONTACT(S): Francois.courau@alcatel-lucent.fr

Submission Date:June 17, 2008

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IS: Communication onboard Aircraft

• Reminder of the mechanism

GGW

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Public Land Network

1. Passenger handset 2. Airborne system

(including GSM Picocell and NCU)

3. Air - to - ground link 4. Ground station

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MSC/ SGSN

Description of the end-to-end system

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• ETSI has two main achievements– Harmonized EN for the GSM onboard aircraft system covering

the essential requirements of Article 3.2 of the R&TTE Directive• Was published as EN 302 480 Ver. 1.1.2

• Was sent to the European commission on 2008-04-24

• is planned to soon be published in the Official Journal of the European Union

– Consequence: from the 2008/07/17 equipment to be put onboard aircraft to provide telecommunication services can be put in place all over Europe.

– Several Airlines companies have already started to deliver Short Messages and Multimedia messages to passengers on an experimental basis to test the acceptability by customers:

• in phase 1 customers on board the aircraft could send/receive SMS and multimedia messages but the voice-service was disabled,

• in phase 2 (which started April 2008) voice as well as data was made available onboard the aircraft.

Highlight of Current Activities (1)

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Strategic Direction

• Following the testing period, full operation is planned by ONAIR

• The deployment of such a system in Europe if successful may push ONAIR and Airlines to look for generalization of the system to intercontinental flight

• This will involve further collaboration between PSOs in the field of preventing the system to be harmful to other terrestrial system.

• Other technology could be foreseen in the future as new technologies are now under worldwide deployment asking for similar type of service to be available for them.