Brian Case wrote:


As I understand it that signal bar you see on you Cell phone is
dictates how much power the cell phone uses to transmit. So the closer
you are to the tower the less power it uses to transmit. This is why
you phone batteries probably last longer in town than the do out in
the boondocks.

The cellular phone does use an adaptive power control (it's not tied to
the signal strength bar).

The problem is that even at mimimal power, if you're sitting close to
the window, you can be heard equally well by a large number of cells
over the system. There's nothing magic that they can do to stop this
short of rf shielding the aircraft windows somehow.