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Got a Cell Phone Booster? FCC Says You Have To Turn It Off
First time accepted submitter Dngrsone writes "Some two million people have bought cell-phone wireless signal boosters and have been using them to get better communication between their phones and distant cell towers. But now, the FCC says they all have to turn their boosters off and ask permission from their providers, and register their devices with those providers, before they can turn them back on."
I'm just falling all over myself to listen to an agency that fines people tens of thousands of dollars for saying "fuck" on the radio.
Oh, great. More bullshit.
How do I turn off my as seen on TV signal boosting sticker?
I'll turn my booster off when the FCC forces cellular companies to provide better coverage. Until then, they can both bite me.
Devices transmitting in the regulated bands (as opposed to unregulated space like the Wifi spectrum) have to meet & be tested for certain noninterference properties, which is only valid if they're used unmodified. A provider could get a device+addon combination certified, however.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This amazing cell phone booster works on all brands. It looks like a sticker with weird tattoo image like log printed on it. All I have to do is to open the battery cover and stick it to the inside of that cover. That is all. I am guaranteed to get four bars on the antenna no matter where I go. I itching to get my hands on this thing, I would like to rub it in the face of my friends who are paying big bucks for brand name companies like Verizon, AT&T and T-mobile. My cell phone provider just charges me 10$ and his coverage map does not include my home. But, they don't know about this amazing cell phone booster. It is going to be sweet baby!, so I thought.
Suddenly this big government is thrusting its nose where it is none of its business and is banning the cell phone booster. What am I going to do?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...that will happen.
This. The cell phone providers are selling devices and subscriptions to fempto-cells and these boosters cut into that market and compete with their services. This isn't about the airwaves.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
...and I'll give you a perfect example of what they're trying to fight. I work in a stadium, in an area covered by 15-20 different "cell towers" (real towers, DAS, COWs, etc). The TV production crew works in one or more 53' aluminum expando trailers. Depending on how they're grounded, a lot of them make pretty impressive Faraday Cages - meaning cell phone and radio services are terrible inside them. Some of the TV truck engineers have installed active cell repeaters to help combat this, but of course forget if they have them turned on or not.
A TV truck came to town during an NFL game, they happened to be a truck whose engineers I'm close friends with and I happen to be aware that they run a repeater. During the game I hear reports of cell network issues. I'm walking through a service area only to find a guy with a spectrum analyzer waiving a directional antenna around the halls. I ask him what he's doing, and he says that six cell towers have been completely shut down due to some interference and it's making cell phone communication nearly impossible. (There is a baseball park next door. This can easily lead to tragedy when you have 100,000+ cell phones on the same street corner and no way to call out due to interference and capacity bottlenecks.)
I asked the engineer if he knew when the interference started, he said about 8am Saturday. He said it went away for a while, but then started up again at about 6am on game day. This is the exact schedule the TV trucks were powered up. I tell him to hang on, go to the truck engineers, and ask them if their repeater is on. I tell them to pull it, walk back in to the engineer, and ask how the towers are doing. He says everything seems to be fine now, and asks me what the issue was. I tell him it's taken care of, and walk away.
One cell repeater, left on accidentally in a densely populated area, effectively shut down communications at two major sporting events. They seem like a great idea, but they amplify so much noise at such a high power that they blow regular cell users who can't reach the repeater out of the water. I've seen it happen, and I'm glad the FCC is doing something about it.
Easily. A directional antenna and a spectrum analyzer. They do it. http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3482363&cid=42967297
They just don't care if you're not interfering with their regular service operations.
You could always install a passive repeater - two antennas and a wire connecting them. They're not illegal, and they pass signal out of faraday cages effectively. Make the outside antenna a directional one and point it in the general direction of your nearest tower, and you shouldn't have any issues.
In order to use a Consumer Signal Booster, a consumer must:
Have some form of consent from his/her wireless provider to operate the Consumer
Signal Booster. We note that Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T, and the RTG
member companies have made voluntary commitments to consent to all Consumer Signal
Boosters that meet the Network Protection Standard.42 Therefore, we expect that
subscribers of these companies will not need to specifically seek consent from these
providers, or other providers who make similar “blanket” consent commitments, for
Consumer Signal Boosters that meet the Network Protection Standard.
So, consent is needed, and most providers have already given blanket consent.
Maybe the boys over at ARS didn't bother to read anything other than the limited FAQ, either? Or more likely they did like any "news" organization and selectively picked out the pieces that would get them the most hits on their website regardless of how they were bending the truth.
So you can't get coverage in your location without booster, and you need to call your provider to ask permission to turn the booster on, but you can't get signal to make the call? What then, telegram?
I am not a crackpot.
So about five years ago everyone in the office was complaining about how they had "No Service" on their cell phones... so I went ahead and installed a "booster"-- an outdoor antenna with amp connected to an indoor antenna.
A few months later, some gentlemen from "AT&T Security" showed up at my office and told me they had been trying to diagnose problems with their nearby tower for several months... until they spotted the outdoor antenna on my building, and aimed some sort of gadget at it and discovered it to be a booster. They said the problem was that their antenna system was seeing the increased signal strength of my booster antenna as if their system was receiving strong signals from cell phones in the neighborhood, and their system was automatically lowering its output signal strength, causing users in the area to have dropped calls and poor connections...
They told me that legally they, as a carrier, had priority on the cell spectrum and I had no choice but to turn off or be fined. So if someone's booster is interfering with public cell use, they WILL hunt you down and pry it from your cold, dead hands.
When government is involved, everything is political. From the control of the airwaves to scientific research.
Freedom means being free and switching the channel if you don't like the F-work.
Consumerism and the way mass-media is done* has bred a dominant culture of intellectual and emotional babies. They're stuck at an infantile mentality and the surest sign of it is the unwillingness to take personal responsibility. A form of this personal failing is like this: "it's not good enough that *I* don't engage in an activity I disagree with - no one else should do it either!" This pathological inability to be satisfied with anything less than such options not being present at all is a complete rejection of even the slightest self-determinism. It's like these people don't even trust themselves not to watch, read, listen to, or engage in something they find distasteful.
They demand some authority to do this selection for them, and of course authorities are only too happy to find another growth area for their power. They look for it the same way businesses look to expand into new markets. Power instead of money is just a different form of currency. Usually "for the children" provides a good excuse, which again goes back to personal responsibility; it is a rejection of the idea that parents should actually be parents and be involved in what their children are exposed to. Soon enough the whole concept will be deemed absurd and wishful thinking, despite the generations before who did exactly that.
It's scary to consider that we are rapidly becoming a culture that conceives of freedom as being too bothersome. After all, real freedom means that other people might do things you wouldn't do yourself. Allowing consenting adults (and only those) to do such things would mean, most of all, believing in the power of your own counter-example if you really find some thing (drugs, curse words, whatever) so offensive. It would also mean having the emotional maturity to let go of the need to control other people, to be content living your own life as you see fit and giving others the tolerance and space to do the same.
This is what we're losing. It's no bargain because I have yet to see what we're gaining.
* Mass media doesn't inherently influence people to be shallow and stupid. It's one of those "corporations make more money that way" sort of deals. Governments also find it more convenient to rule over a population that won't question anything too deeply. Then the candidate who wins is usually the one with the most money to spend on advertising.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Ham licenses don't grant authority to operate on cell frequencies or interoperate with stations in other services (like cell towers) in non-emergency situations.
I have a thousand watt linear and use it on my cell. Back in analog phone days my neighbors could hear my calls on their TVs and landlines.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Indeed! We're losing access to the common airwaves! I demand a return to a libertarian paradise where anyone can overconsume a shared resource until the resource is so depleted that nobody can have access to it.
Dear libertarian, one day you may learn what Winston Churchill meant by "Democracy is the worst of all possible forms of government, except for all the other forms that have ever been tried." Unfortunately that day is not today.
That logic generally works where economic allocation of resources is practiced. It fails where a resource is commonly available in perceived high quantities and the means to use it are simply obtained or inexpensive. For example, increased sales of radio transceivers won't make the price of radio communication higher, as after the sunk capital cost the only expense is the electricity to power it. Instead the experience just degrades in quality. Likewise, using the atmosphere as a dumping ground for waste gases won't become more expensive by purely economic means.
In both cases there will be an ability, if not a tendency, to overconsume in the lack of a non-economic regulator.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Actually, the military and licensed government spectrum is controlled by the National Telecommunications & Information Administration. It informs the FCC what frequencies will be used by federal users. The FCC only regulates use of the spectrum by non-federal users.
Both must coordinate with each other, of course, and international bodies like the International Telecommunications Union.
To put that more straightforwardly: libertarians assume that there is a natural economic process to internalize all external costs when there is not. That is the underlying flaw of neo-liberalism.
I'm sorry, but while I do understand that there is diversity within every political position:
This is absolute nonsense. Everyone except those of a particularly religious bent believes their political beliefs are totally rational, and a huge percentage of people don't grasp basic logic enough to demonstrate that. Every outlook is fundamentally built on predicates. For example the de-facto core predicate of libertarianism goes something like this "Liberty is the highest good." Most, or at least many, Americans agree with this tenant, but when it's twisted to be "Liberty from government interference is the only good" it becomes a dangerous short-circuit on the role of society in achieving humanistic goals. I have objections with most libertarian thought in that it implicitly endorses many kinds of harm one private citizen can visit upon another, with no mechanism for limiting that harm.
I cannot, of course, explicitly say everyone who shares identification with that world view is engaged in the same kind of mistakes, but I can identify commonly considered core principles to be poorly reasoned.