This is hot garbage ass bullshit. The reason you are not allowed to have a phone on in an air plane is because of cell towers. When you are in the air your cell phone tries to connect to multiple towers, and is switching between them at a high rate as you travel. It clogs up the towers and costs the cell companies a bunch of money by increasing the amount of radio traffic. It used to be that the excess radio waves were a slight issue for the planes, very slight, back when fewer frequencies were utilized. That ended decades ago. The rule stands because it clogs up network traffic and costs money. That's it. Cell towers have a finite amount of connections they can make, if you have 50+ phones traveling at over 300 mph each trying to take up a connection on multiple towers, hopping along a route, it fucks things up. Multiply that by several planes, it REALLY fucks things up. But if you take one single connection, the plane's one dedicated connection, you can then share the "lane" and provide wifi through cells towers at passes over at a significant drop in resource cost. The author of this article is an ignorant faggot that didn't bother to do shit for research.