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Bar In UK Uses Faraday Cage To Block Mobile Phone Signals (telegraph.co.uk)
Reader Bruce66423 writes: A cocktail bar owner has installed a Faraday cage in his walls to prevent mobile phone signals entering the building. Steve Tyler of the Gin Tub, in Hove, East Sussex, is hoping customers will be encouraged to talk to each other rather than looking at their screens. He has installed metal mesh in the walls and ceiling of the bar which absorbs and redistributes the electromagnetic signals from phones and wireless devices to prevent them entering the interior of the building. The effect was discovered in 1836 by scientist Michael Faraday and is often used in power plants or other highly charged environments to prevent shocks or interference with other electronic equipment. Some wallets are now cloaked in a similar flexible mesh to prevent data and credit card theft. Mr Tyler said he wanted to force "people to interact in the real world" and remember how to socialise. "I just wanted people to enjoy a night out in my bar, without being interrupted by their phones," he said. "So rather than asking them not to use their phones, I stopped the phones working. I want you to enjoy the experience of going out."
Good thing you have a choice whether to give them business, or not.
But something tells me the typical Slashdotter will still have a knee-jerk complaint about it.
They are literally a 3 second walk from one of several doors at any given time. I'm sure they'll be fine.
I know! It'll be like the dark ages back in 1995 again. People died man. People died.
Just hope there is no incident that happens where some really needs to make a call.
As long as people are aware of the situation then what's the problem??
I can drive 5 miles off the freeway around here and not have any cell service. Should I be scared to go there because I might really need to make a call?
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I went to Buffalo, NY to visit family recently and a restaurant we went to tried encouraging people to put away their phones and talk. Instead of installing a Faraday cage, though, they put a basket (of the type they serve bread in) on the table. Everyone's phones went in and stayed there. If we kept our phones there during the entire meal, we got 10% off our check. (We kept our phones there and had fun taking "mental photos" of the kids instead of cell phone photos.)
I much prefer this system. It gives you an incentive to keep from looking at your phone without actively blocking your phone from being used. In case of an emergency, your phone is right there for you to use, but most times it'll just stay in the basket until after dinner is over.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Does that mean I can sue the city when I miss an important call while in a parking deck? Get real, mate. There's nothing to stop this guy from saying "get off my lawn". Passive blocking is his prerogative. If you don't want to lose contact, drink somewhere else.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
I think the implication here is that he would rather people like you go somewhere else. Nothing worse than someone loudly yapping on the phone at the bar. This place is aiming to become a refuge for people like us, against people like you.
It's an documentary detailing several very old Irish pubs, and while they don't mention a Faraday Cage, they bring up how the classic "Pub" concept is starting to fade because so many people are wrapped up in the Internet and electronics that they simply don't know how to just sit and converse.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
This is the UK, those lawsuits dont happen here because we have common fucking sense - you have no inherent human right to make or receive phone calls on private property, so there is no implicit consent needed. Faraday cage or not, missing someones death or your kid getting knocked down gives you no grounds to sue the property owner because you couldnt make or receive a phone call.
As soon as one of his customers has a serious emergency while at the bar, and ends up missing their grandmother's death or their kid being hit by a car, it will be lawsuit time. I think it's a novel idea, but even in a less litigious country than the US, you'd have to have a sign outside the bar announcing the Faraday cage for entering to be considered implicit consent to have your wireless signal blocked. (I would think. I'm not a lawyer though.)
As someone who remembers a world before cell phones, I really get tired of this legal argument.
No government issues citizens a mandatory cell phone. Cellular service is also not legally mandated by any Fire Marshall for the purposes of certifying building occupancy, nor is it a requirement to establish and run a bar business.
And until they do, how about we FUCKING DROP this bullshit notion that you can sue someone for not having cellular capability 24 hours a day everywhere.
I direct a Boy Scouts of America-accredited Cub Scout Day Camp. We operate our camp in an area with no cellular phone coverage. There are POTS phones, however, and we post a list of emergency phone numbers and directions to the nearest emergency phone in each program area.
I suspect this guy has a POTS or VOIP telephone somewhere in the bar. The prudent thing to do in a place of public accommodation where cellular telephone service is not available is to post a notice that a telephone is available for emergencies and state where it is. It's that simple. He probably already has a posted map to the fire exits in the main dining room/bar already, if fire safety regulations there are anything like what they are here.
I think if the guy were to post "EMERGENCY TELEPHONE BEHIND BAR - DIAL 911" (substitute whatever the dispatcher number is in the UK is) on the door underneath his business hours, he'd be doing his due.
I'm hardly ever on my phone, but I do need to be available for emergency calls, and that's why I have a phone in the first place. If I DO have to take a call, I tend to say "please excuse me, I have an important call" and then I go outside with my phone. I don't want those around me to hear me struggling to hear the caller and hushing their conversation, and I don't like to struggle to hear the caller in the first place. :people to interact with the real world." I think he is trying to discourage the man sitting alone in his bar from being on his cell phone playing games, the woman sitting alone at the table scrolling through facebook... He wants to take away the distractions that people use to isolate themselves and avoid intereacting with strangers, and probably hopes that people in his establishment will actually start to talk and interact together. I don't know if this will work, but good luck to him!
Cameras? Pictures? Facebook? Games? I think that these are what the owner of the establishment had in mind as he put the Faraday cage into his walls... His comment was that he wanted
Yes, you should avoid it completely.
You probably don't remember but back in the 80s when you had no cellphone, you probably died 3 or 4 times per year because you couldn't call the emergency services.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
At least they can have a decent pub quiz that isn't ruined by surreptitious Googling (though some git will probably download offline Wikipedia).
You jest, but the people that did die in 80s because help couldn't get there soon enough aren't around to tell you their story.
Of course they did, but the world is large and all sorts of things happen. The question, of course, is how much. At no point in the 80s did I know someone who died who in hindsight would have not died had cellphone coverage existed. Any vaguely built up area in the 80s had landlines, so for areas where emergency services could respond quickly, phones were not in especially short supply in an emergency.
There are plenty of places now without cellphone coverage and yet, surprisingly many in cities (anywhere underground), and yet it still isn't a problem that people are dying in droves. The other aspect is the nature of deaths. Survivorship bias is a thing, but we can work things out.
Deaths are rare, about 9 per 1000 people per year. Given a reasonably occupancy numbers (100 people?) and occupancy time (it's a bar, say 5 hours per day for those 100), and say it has those numbers for the full 365 days per year. That gives an average 20 person years per year occupancy. Amortized over the whole population, that's an expected 1 death every 5 years with some pretty generous numbers.
Except of course, the majority of deaths are not unexpected. Most deaths occur among the elderly and sick and are somewhat expected, and spike for the very young too. The bar setting pretty much excludes those demographics. You can also subtract off the majority of the accidental deaths too since for example traffic collisions are rare indoors (and besides, that would put a huge hole in the shielding, letting in phone signals anyway, bystanders notwithstanding).
The expected number of deaths is somewhere in the region of one in several decades at most. So you're down to (say) 1 death in 20-30 years for which a cellphone might be useful.
The other side is of course that cellphone coverage is not ubiquitous by any means and we're talking about a bar which will certainly have a physical land line wired in too.
For the cellphone to be the key factor, there has to be no other means of dialling 999 (unlikely given the bar will have a phone), the person has to be saveable, and the emergency services would have had to arrive in time even with the cell phone call.
Those are hard to estimate of course, but the probabilities are all less than unity.
In other words, the chance of someone croaking in the bar who would have been saved by a cellhphone is negligible.
TL;DR unexpected deaths are rare. The number of lives saves by cellphones must be less than the accident rate, so the effect is quite small.
SJW n. One who posts facts.