You will soon be allowed to talk on your cell phones when traveling internationally on Virgin Atlantic Airlines. Scheduled to launch this summer, Virgin Atlantic will allow phone calls, e-mails, text and Smartphone web browsing on some flights between select U.S. cities and Europe. The carrier says that calls are meant to be very limited both in frequency and number of simultaneous calls being made, limited to six but soon to be upgraded to eight with unlimited texts and data usage.
The Service will be costly since you will have to use Virgin Atlantic’s on-board technology. Only customers of cell phone carriers T-Mobile, Vodafone and O2 will be able to use the service when it debuts. The cost for making a call is expected to be about $1.20 per minute and $.30 for each text.
Currently, the FCC forbids the use of cell phones while flying on American owned carriers but this is expected to put added pressure on U.S carriers to match this type of service.
