Airplane GSM network supplied to Mongolia

TECHNOLOGY THAT was originally developed to enable mobile phone calls to be made on aircraft has found its way to Mongolia.

Mobicom, a Mongolian mobile operator, has just signed up to Altobridge’s Access Manager Gateway (AMG).

The chief benefit is AMG makes it economically viable to create a base station that has a few as 100 subscribers.

"Asia is the market where the next billion [GSM] mobile subscribers are going to be coming from so this is a big deal for us," said Altobridge spokeswoman, Linda Hickey.

There's a big demand for base stations for remote locations in many Asian countries.

The savings are made by routing the voice part of a mobile call locally while the signalling part still goes back to the network centre.

That way the base station still knows who the subscriber is but doesn't have to route the call via the backhaul network (which is probably a satellite link).

Hickey says that this method can save up to 70 per cent of the cost of placing a call traditionally.

Altobridge's tehnology was behind what is claimed to be the world's first commercial inflight 'personal mobile phone serivice' which was supplied by Aeromobile for an Emirates Airline Airbus A340300 back on March 20^th.

What they mean is that you could use your own GSM mobile phone and send texts as well as make voice calls.

Altobridge has shrunk the hardware requirements so much that the company can supply a base station in a briefcase.

It's called a Remote Contiguous Communications (RCC) and consists of the Altobridge gateway, a standard picocellular base station and a satellite transmission unit (ie Inmarsat GAN/BGAN).

Hickey claims the thing is so compact they stuck one on a yatch at MWC, Barcelona.

The RCC is aimed at supplying communications in the event of a disaster, but the INQ can see it be used by businesses such as the oil industry for exploration. µ