France Legalizes Mobile Phone Jamming

Metrollica writes: "Wired has reported that France has become the first country to legalize mobile phone jamming in public much to the support of the citizens. A quote from the article indicates that jamming will 'make it impossible to make or receive calls, voice mails and text messages on a mobile telephone.'"

Comments

Low-tech jamming

[billcopc]

We all hate people and their cellphones.. we especially hate them in movie theatres or other venues where silence is of utmost importance (school, anyone ?). Now does that mean that some kludgy electronic jamming system is going to work well enough without causing too many woes to the rest of us, who are decent enough to shut the damned ringer off like we're supposed to ? I think not.

The good old method works fine: if some jerk whips out his/her phone in the theatre, shush them. If they don't shush, then ask them politely.. and THEN if they don't comply, everyone in the theatre is welcome to pummel the worthless bastard. Two or three deaths like this, and the rest will behave. Fear works wonders.

Re:what about..

[satch89450]

Ok, so what happens when you live in an apartment in the inner city and one of the neighboring businesses decided that they wish to use this technology to make their restaurant peaceful for the customers?

If we were dealing with high power or [comparatively] low frequencies, you would have a point. Frankly, the metal used in commercial buildings tends to block RF at the frequencies used by cell phones -- unless the building owners specifically take steps to make the signal available within his store.

Jammers don't need to be powerful to be effective. When the building's walls attenuate the signal 30-40 dB already, it doesn't take much radiation inside the cage to completely mask the signal from the cell site, and result in a "No Signal" indication. Done right, it would take a handful of milliwatts to get the job done...and the same wall that attenuates incoming signals also attenuates the level of the jamming signal seen outside the building, so neighboring buildings wouldn't be affected at all.

In the school situation you brought up in your question, the school would deploy a number of very-low-power tuned-band white-noise generators in the building so that the jamming effect would not be noticed from the parking lot or the playground, let alone at the neighbor's house or the road in front of the school.