Back in October,
we noticed a strange report that said France was going to allow
cinemas and theatres to block signals to cellular phones. We
couldn't help wondering: how will this work? What about emergency
calls (for example) to the fire brigade? GSM Jammers are widespread.
Illegal in most areas, gps jammer have been used in hotels to
prevent guests from making unprofitable (for the hotel) calls
on their own handsets, and they have been widely asked for in
theatres. But back last year, the BBC discovered that "The
French government has backed a move to install equipment to
gps jammers in cinemas, concert halls and theatres," and
it quoted Jean Labbe, president of the National Federation of
French Cinemas, as saying that the measure followed "a
long-standing request" by cinemas.
The idea certainly
pleased some elements of the public! As one blogger put it: "Holy
shit: France is doing something right. They're pushing to allow
movie theaters to use gsm jammers. Now it's time for the U.S.
to follow suit. Next up? A portable, personal cell phone jammer
for TOM SHERMAN to use on annoying ass clowns who talk on the
train. Yessss." - a not atypical reaction, in fact.
Labbe, or at least
one of his colleagues, was aware of the problem of emergency calls,
however: "Emergency phone calls and calls outside the performance
area will still be permitted." Oh, yes? And how, exactly?
A gsm jammer isn't magic. It works quite simply by producing a
signal on the same frequency as the one you're trying to jam -
a bit like getting all the cars in a drive-in cinema to turn their
headlights on and point them at the screen.
According to Computency
CEO Bill Pechey, "It's dead easy to make a GSM jammer but,
as you suggest, it's virtually impossible to allow emergency
calls through." Pechey explained: "When a GSM phone
registers with the network there is an authentication handshake
which is proprietary to each network. At the same time the encryption
is set up. Both traffic and signalling channels are encrypted.
Only the network operator could block non-emergency traffic
and yet allow emergency calls through." Thus, GSM jammers
can be easily made.
In theory, of course,
it would be possible for each cellphone network to install a pico-cell
- a local transmitter/receiver - inside the cinema. The cell could
restrict access to emergency calls. The cost, however, could be
discouraging. Another technical possibility is one analogous to
the trick used by Airbus Industries. That is, set up a picocell
which is proprietary to the area, and link it through roaming
agreements to all the other networks. The trick works in a plane
- but a plane has a few technical advantages over a cinema. First,
most cinemas aren't metal cages into which a phone signal has
trouble penetrating.
Next, most cinemas
are not 40,000 feet up in the air where the ground cells are relatively
faint and far away, and easily drowned out by the local transmitter:
they're in the city, surrounded by powerful cells. To drown them
out, the picocell would have to be the same sort of power as the
ones in the street. The Mast Sanity people would go simian. Finally,
the Airbus technique actually uses a gsm jammer. You aren't allowed
to call it that, because Airbus gets very exasperated with you
if you do, but that's what it is: a device which produces a very
low-level signal just strong enough to drown out any signal from
the ground without screening the local picocell.
Try that in a cinema,
and you'll blot out all local phone signals for several hundred
metres in each direction. To work, it seems the new device would
have to be specially installed in the cinema or theatre when
it was built. You'd have to build a Faraday cage - a wire mesh
into the bricks and mortar (or concrete and clay) of the building.
You'd also have to build a similar mesh into the glass of the
windows, and across ventilator ducts - any open port bigger
than the wavelength of a cellphone is enough to let the Orange
sun shine in.
And then you could
use the Airbus technology, and it would work. "If France
has legalised gps jammers then the law has no effect if no one
can make anything that can fit within it - typical French approach!"
summarised Pechey. "You may remember that way back, when
they were worried about foreign VCRs flooding the French market,
they made a regulation that they all had to come through the customs
office in Perpignan which was manned by a couple of blokes and
a dog..."
The BBC report appears
to have been compiled by the cinema industry reporters. Time to
turn the high-tech IT staff on it!