Cell phone wars coming to an aircraft near you

Cell phones have long been banned from aircraft in north america.

In recent times, some airlines outside north america have made plans to incude
micro cells in an aircraft to provide some wireless services such as SMS and
GPRS on passenger's own cellphones.

Recently, Qualcomm, the owner of the proprietary CDMA protocol used in the
USA, made an
official test in the USA to show that cellphones do not interfere with
avionics and where there is an emitter inside the aircraft, the phones don't
lock onto ground stations. From the plane, it is a satellite link back to the
land based networks. The test was done with American Airlines.

Now, if the FAA does allow this to happen, I can foresee interesting wars in
the cellphone industry. If Airline A goes with carrier 1 and airline B goes
with carrier 2, then this will be quite similar to frequent flyier loyalty
that used to exist: a customer that uses carrier 2 is less likely to fly
Airline A if airline A doesn't support his phone in flight.

And I can see airlines negotiating sweet deals with a particular carrier to
allow that carrier on board its fleet of aircraft, along with marketing campaigns.