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Posted: 08-09-2004 16:42 Post subject: Do hotels jam signals?

Do hotels jam signals?

As a frequent guest at a Hampton Inn in Salt Lake City, Murray Trepel often finds himself powering down his cell phone and picking up the house phone..'My cellphone seldom works anywhere near the hotel,' said Trepel, the senior manager for a call-center service provider in Logan, Utah. 'Not just in my room, but in the parking lot as well.'.What is going on? Trepel, like many business travelers who depend on uninterrupted service from their wireless company, has a long list of probable culprits - including the building's architecture, the area's geography and the cell phone industry's erratic coverage..But another theory is starting to gain traction among business travelers: Hotels are blocking the signals..They would certainly have the motive to do so. Cellphones have bitten into their earnings. Thanks largely to the preponderance of portables, the profits from in-room phones dropped 76 percent in four years, sliding from $644 an available room in 2000 to $152 last year, according to the hotel consulting firm PKF in San Francisco..The downturn accounted for 10 percentage points of the hotel industry's 36 percent decline in profits during the same period. 'Hotels are unhappy about that lost profit,' said Robert Mandelbaum, PKF's director of research..But are they so unhappy that they are biting back? No way, say hotel representatives. For starters, they point out, cell-phone-blocking devices are illegal in the United States. 'It would also hurt our customers, and it's something we would never do,' said Courtnie Widerburg, the general manager of the Salt Lake City Hampton Inn..Besides, her hotel already offers free local calls and high-speed Internet access, and its franchise agreement limits how much it can bill for long-distance service, she said..Hard evidence is scant that hotels are using jammers - at least in the United States. Last year, a Scottish newspaper reported that phone jammers were being sold to hotels in Britain as tools for increasing revenue from in-room phones..'Harassed by mobile phones or hotel phone system not being used?' asked one of the promotional leaflets distributed to the hotels. 'Then look no further. Purchase a mobile phone jammer for your hotel, restaurant and bar. Small and discreet.'.Loreen Haim-Cayzer, the director of marketing and sales for Netline Communications Technologies in Tel Aviv, Israel, acknowledged that her company had sold hundreds of cellphone jammers to hotels around the world. But asked if any of them were in the United States, Haim-Cayzer said she could not disclose the identity of clients..When a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers survey showed the number of calls made from hotel room phones had fallen by 40 percent during the last four years, the firm's lodging consultants wondered whether hotels were fighting back by investing in wireless jamming technology. An investigation, however, turned up nothing. 'It's possible that there are hotels using cellphone jammers,' said Bjorn Hanson, a PricewaterhouseCoopers hotel analyst. 'But we couldn't find them.'.Then again, it is nearly impossible to prove that jamming technology is being used. 'If you turn your phone on and it says 'no service,' then that's the only hint that you're being jammed,' said Barry Zellen, editor of Technologyinnovator.com, a Web site that covers wireless security issues. 'If you're in an area that has good coverage and you pull into a hotel driveway, and suddenly there's a dead zone, then you can probably speculate that there's something unnatural going on.'.Adding to the intrigue is the fact that the Federal Communications Commission has never issued a fine for the use of a cellphone jammer, according to an agency spokesman. But not everyone sees that as proof that the devices are not in use. 'The FCC rule prohibiting cellphone jammers is unenforced,' said Howard Melamed, the chief executive of CellAntenna, a cellular-communications technology company..The New York Times

http://www.iht.com/articles/537668.html

Posted: 08-09-2004 19:37 Post subject:

The Netline website seems to back up the trade in these devices, mostly for the prevention of industrial espionage and the like

http://www.netline.co.il/CAA_product.htm

But I would have thought that it was in someway illegal to deliberately interfere with wireless communications.

Posted: 09-09-2004 08:02 Post subject:

Hmmm, I don´t think the hotels are really entitled to do this. The noise can´t be that bad, as people will be talking and snoring in the rooms anyway. It´s not like a library or cinema. But as far as I know, jammers send out a weak signal all the time. Should be real easy to make some equipment to detect them.

Posted: 09-09-2004 11:27 Post subject:

I'm a bit puzzled by the statement that it's almost impossible to detect jamming devices. I presume they work on the principle of sending out a signal that intereferes with all other signals, and therefore the jamming signal can be detected and should be locatable (is that a word?) by measuring that signal's strength.

The science behind making mobile phone signals work in built-up areas is very complex, and I think it more likely that this inherent complexity holds the answer rather than having to come up with other theories. It could be that the mobile signals are badly attenuated because of the surrounding buildings, but because this area is frequented by lots of people (because it's a hotel) then it's simply a case of more people being there to notice it. Hotels by their nature are desiged to accommodate many people in a single building, and if the proportion of people who use their mobile phones frequently (i.e. businesspeople on business) is high, then there may simply be too many people for the available coverage to deal with. I used to live opposite Twickenham rugby ground and every match day my mobile phone died because the number of users in such a small area far exceeded the network capacity.

Posted: 11-10-2013 09:36 Post subject:

Maybe, I once heard that some hotels install phone jammers.

Posted: 12-10-2013 09:56 Post subject:

However, the sort of building that was popular in the 1980's with the metal bits on the outside makes a very effective Faraday cage which will block phone signals. I work in one sometimes, you can only get a phone signal right by the windows - and I mean RiGHT by the windows, with the phone almost touching the glass - or by going outside if you'd rather not look silly.

Posted: 12-10-2013 10:30 Post subject:

Posted: 12-10-2013 12:57 Post subject:

Someone's still jamming Ted- he hasn't posted in over a year!

Posted: 12-10-2013 13:32 Post subject:

Posted: 12-10-2013 13:36 Post subject:

Anybody know what's happened to Ted Maul?

Posted: 12-10-2013 13:59 Post subject: