Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

"In a world where a $100 smartphone can be tracked for free, the $250 million jet vanished."

It sounds like Inmarsat is now making basic ping location available for free:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182223-inmarsat-now-givin...

"The company already offers a similar service for ships and boats, which use Inmarsat’s network free of charge for distress signalling."

Interestingly, back when I was an intern, BT used to charge an exorbitant rate for those distress calls. I once wrote-up the whole internship thing http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/17282439831/an-ei...

"I was pretty uncomfortable when I found that mayday calls were being charged at the highest rate - £8 per minute if I recall correctly - even though Inmarsat itself explicitly carried those calls for free. I remember the manager I asked about that, when I found those calls in real logs, not meeting my eyes as he talked distantly about why that was."

:-) It is already being done.

The problem is that water is an excellent RF attenuator. Even if the phone was working, it would be useless even under a few metres of water. For this reason submarine communication is only one way and requires kilometre long ELF emitters (which everyone in the world can pick up). Above 20m depth you can use VLF, but it's still only one way.

The second problem is that phone location relies on there being a cell tower nearby (or a few so you can triangulate). You don't get a good reception in the middle of the Pacific, I'm guessing.

Not to mention the third problem that we're told to put our phones into airplane mode anyway. Even if the phones had WiFi or Bluetooth on, it's a higher frequency than GSM and has an even poorer range underwater.