| Friday Jan 19 2000 The days of having to leave your wireless phone behind when taking a European cruise may soon be in the past. Brittany Ferries has announced plans to install one of the world's first private wireless networks on board a cruise ship, the Val de Loire. The cruise company, which travels between nine ports in France, Ireland, Britain and Spain, has contracted with Menlo Park, California-based Interwave Communications (Nasdaq: IWAV - news) to install a digital wireless base station on board the ship. The station will link into a VSAT (very small aperture terminal) satellite-based system from Geolink. Private-branch telephone exchanges that are fed by satellites have been available on ships for several years, but Brittany Ferries said this is the first time a GSM base station has been installed on a cruise ship for passenger use. Satellite-Routed Calls The network will allow cruise passengers to use their regular mobile phones on and around the ship, just as if they were using a land-based network. The difference is that calls made outside the ship's cellular zone will be routed through a satellite. Brittany Ferries says it plans to install an Interwave "GSM Network in a Box" system that will begin service in January. Interwave's base station, the Wavexpress, is contained in a PC tower-sized unit that weighs about 50 pounds. The system uses four hardware modules: the CPU card, radio card, switching trunk card and the antennae connection card. System Supports 16 Channels All of the modules use the same central processor unit and switching trunk modules, as well as the same core of library applications. Each Wavexpress can be configured to support up to 16 mobile phone channels. the satellite capabilities and the GSM compact network system will enable the Val de Loire to provide its passengers with a service similar to international roaming on their phones, said Claude Barraud, president of Group Geolink, in a press release. In September, Interwave joined BT A&M, an aeronautical and maritime telecommunications software producer, in a successful trial of a wireless communications system for P&O Cruises' flagship Aurora. Wireless on Aircraft Air-to-ground wireless service may not be limited much longer to pilots or passengers in private aircraft. BAE Systems is now moving toward deploying a technology that enables calls on commercial flights. BAE and Scandinavian airline SAS announced in August they were developing an in-flight mobile phone service for aircraft named CabinCall, which uses Interwave's wireless networking technology. The airline's systems are expected to be deployed in August. Use of mobile phones is forbidden by airlines because of concerns that it can interfere with an aircraft's radio and navigation systems. BAE, which was created in November 1999 by as a result of a merger between British Aerospace and GEC Marconi Electronic Systems, intends to provide safe airborne wireless connections by equipping an aircraft with an antenna that is a scale model of the radio antenna used in terrestrial base stations.
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