Patent ID: 8831601

Claim:
A terrestrial communications network suitable for providing air-to-ground connectivity, comprising: a plurality of native cellular nodes configured to provide wireless communication connectivity to one or more ground-based wireless communication devices, each native cellular node including a base transceiver station (BTS) having one or more transceivers configured to transmit a downlink signal to the one or more ground-based wireless communication devices at a native downlink frequency and receive an uplink signal from the one or more ground-based wireless communications devices at a native uplink frequency; and a plurality of augmented cellular nodes configured to provide wireless communication connectivity to one or more airborne communications devices, each augmented cellular node including an augmented BTS having one or more transceivers configured to transmit a downlink signal to the one or more airborne communications devices via one or more upwardly directed antennas at the native downlink frequency and receive an air-to-ground uplink signal from the one or more airborne communications devices at a selected air-to-ground uplink frequency, wherein at least one of the augmented cellular nodes includes one or more power amplifiers configured to amplify the downlink signal transmitted by an upwardly directed antenna such that the downlink signal emanating from the at least one augmented cellular node has a power level larger than a downlink signal emanating from at least one of the native cellular nodes, wherein the plurality of native cellular nodes and the plurality of augmented cellular nodes are configured to operate on a common backhaul infrastructure.