Slashdot Mirror
Low-Tech Cell Phone Blocking
nigelc writes: "This BBC story reports on Japanese work to come up with a low-tech solution to cell phones in cinemas! Hey, if it can stop the person next to me from going 'Hey, dude, guess where I am?,' I'm all in favor of it."
Now, I understand that you get reflection and you can normally see more than one antenna, but this could cause whole other problems with people sheilding other areas as a side effect. I mean, what if I live next door to a cinema and they install this? Suddenly I can't receive mobile phone calls in my house because I'm in the shadow of the cinema!
This raises all kinds of interesting issues. Can I force another property to stop blocking my radio waves? Does it devalue my property (probably, in today's modern soceity, yes.) I know whenever I've looked for places to live in the last few years one of the first things I do when I walk in is see if I can get mobile reception.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
So let's say one of these theatres with RF-shielded walls caught fire. The firefighters rush in, with their VHF two-way radios. But they are now blocked! So if they have to radio warnings, like, "Get out of there, the roof is about to collaps!", they don't hear it, because the wood part of the walls may be on fire, but they are still standing, ferrite intact.
Firefighters died in the World Trade Center *because* the building's construction (the shell had steel vertical beams very close together) blocked the signals from the command on the ground, telling them to evacuate. (This was written up in IEEE Spectrum, I think in April.) Now you want theatres to have this problem, just because some jerks are too tacky to put there phones on "vibrate" or go to the lobby when they get a call?
I'm a parent, and as somebody else noted, we sometimes need to be reached on an emergency basis. I have had to leave a movie because my cell phone *vibrated* and the babysitter told me, while I was standing in the lobby, that there was a problem. I would be hard-pressed to patronize a theater that didn't allow me that luxury.
Back in the sixties, my father was a physician who was often "on call" during his few hours of not actually working. He had an answering service that he checked in with all the time. I think he had occasion to leave them the phone number of the theatre (reserved seat stage, not movie), and his seat, so that an usher could fetch him. We don't do that nowadays; we expect radio waves to do the job. It can be done with minimum annoyance to fellow theatergoers. Blocking is a bad idea.
What i'd like to see, and haven't seen mentioned yet, is a standard for cell phones to switch to vibrate/standby/whatever upon recieving a 'silence beacon' signal. The phone would just have a 3rd setting: ring, silent, or auto. If it comes in range of a silence beacon, it switches to silent. When it goes out of range, it can switch back to ring. It's voluntary, so if you're expecting life or death communications you can leave it on ring, but people are still free to take you phone and throw it. This, along with a ringer schedule to switch to vibrate during meetings and classes, should help a lot if people are willing to use them.