Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
With mobile cell phone etiquette at an all time low, as users talk
loudly into their phones wherever they are, the temptation to illegally
import and use a cell phone jammer has proven overwhelming for some in
the US that just want to stop use of cell phones in their area.
Long banned from use in the US and other first world countries, the jammers work as advertised but can cut off innocent users who find themselves caught in the jammers’ range.
Government facilities such as jails and correctional centres have been keen to use jamming technology for years to prevent criminals from making calls, but so far, effort to allow the legal use of jamming technology has failed.
The NYT reports that jammers are being imported from India, with jammers going from a few hundred US dollars up to US $1,000 and more, in small sizes around that of a pack of playing cards, through to larger units with a better range.
The NYT article talks of users who gained satisfaction from using jammers and preventing others from making calls, especially those loudly yakking away, and explained that the jammers work by sending out a signal which overwhelms the cell phone and prevents it from communicating with towers.
No mention of wireless phone data blockage was made, although a data signal will likely be affected in addition to any voice calling capabilities.
US authorities steadfastly maintain that cell phone jammers are illegal, although being able to specifically find users, especially those that are using portable handheld devices, appears to be quite difficult.
If you’re visiting somewhere and have no phone signal in an area that previously had no problem at all, you may well be the victim of a slowly increasing number of jammers in use, with the only option at the moment to leave the area in question to see if service is magically restored, and then blocked again when re-entering the artificial ‘dead zone’ of no cellular network coverage.
So, for those who hate the interruption of mobile phone calls, no doubt they’ll be saying ‘Wham bam thankyou jam’, while the rest of us blame carriers for new black spots that didn’t appear before.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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