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Commercial Air-to-Ground Telephone Service
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The bands 849 - 851 and 894 - 896 MHz are allocated to the aeronautical mobile service and are used to provide air-to-ground telephone service for commercial airlines. Most people will recognize the Verizon Airfone service, which is installed in the seatbacks of many commercial airlines and which uses this band for its service. The lower band (849 - 851 MHz) is used by the base stations located on the ground to transmit to the planes; transmissions from the planes back to the ground use the upper band, 894 - 896 MHz.
In its original incarnation, the commercial air-to-ground telephone service was to support up to six licensees in this band, where all of the licensees would share the band for traffic channels, and each licensee would have dedicated control channels to manage its own traffic. In the end, Verizon Airfone (originally operated under GTE) was the only operator to remain commercially viable, and even they are estimated to handle, on average, only about three calls per flight. Due to channel bandwidth limitations, the only services that could be offered were voice phone calls and very slow dial-up-quality data connections.
By 2005, the FCC realized that the spectrum was not being used efficiently and instigated a rule making proceeding leading to the auction of new licenses for this band. The exact band plan for this spectrum was left as one of the bidding parameters, and the final result was a plan that provided a 3 MHz license (the bottom 1.5 MHz of each of the two bands), and a 1 MHz license (the top 0.5 MHz of each band). Auction 65, completed in June 2006, generated $38,339,000 for the U.S. treasury, with ACBidCo winning the 3 MHz license and LiveTV winning the 1 MHz license.
Although Verizon Airfone participated in the auction, they did not win, and the FCC banished their operations to the spectrum occupied by the 1 MHz license, and allowed them to continue service until 2010 on a shared basis with the new licensee. On May 13th, 2010, Verizon's Airfone license, KNKG804, expired for good. In June 2008, LiveTV, the winning bidder for Airfone's spectrum, announced that it was purchasing the Verizon Airfone network.
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Paired Frequency Bands |
| Paired Bands | Use | Service | Table |
| 849 - 851 MHz | Ground-to-air | Aeronautical Mobile | - |
| 894 - 896 MHz | Air-to-ground | Aeronautical Mobile | - |
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