Speaking as a passenger-and we do have a a stake in this even if most don't have an interest , it would not worry me flying into an airport witha dozen movements a day if it was remotely controlled from some kind of hub unit so longas there were proper protectios in place for bad visibility etc .
I would asume that for busy places Gatwick LHR MAN its nevr going to hapen because of the scale of operations and the ground movements - look at the capacity at LHR and how it falls when LVPs in operation.
I dont think the telecoms side is an issue at all now although i accept that the often somewhat isolated position of smaller airports might make multiple physical links difficult but I would have thought that most locations could easily get two fixed line paths with a third by microwave or other radio link. In many cases now you can use LAN technology which gives good resilience but needs careful planning to make sure the actual physical carriage of the intermingled data is actually done on sperate links separate. Its not uncommon for companies to find that you buy a service from company A and a back up from company B that t when something goes wrong they both leased the lines from BT and they are in the same cable.
What would worry me though is the issue of bonus driven perhaps not real 'industry' managers (in UK we specialise in non specialist managers to our great national detriment) just pushing the boundaries that little bit too much just to improve this years 'numbers' over last year, So for me it is the worry that the 'business opportunity' will at some point trump safety in some meeting when no one there has ever actually spoken into a mike
PB