IP: One man's cell phone jams tens of thousands of calls

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

From: "Robert Raisch" <raisch () internautics com>
To: "Dave Farber" <farber () cis upenn edu>

One man's cell phone jams tens of thousands of calls

Fox Market Wire - 7.27 p.m. ET (0027 GMT) January 15, 1999

CRYSTAL RIVER, Fla. — When the mysterious white car with tinted windows and a
small satellite dish on top pulled up to Calvin Simpson's motor home, the
retired engineer was puzzled.

{snip}

The men, engineers for GTE Wireless, had found their culprit. For 10 days,
Simpson's cellular phone had been jamming cellular service for tens of
thousands of customers in Florida's Citrus and Hernando counties.

{snip}

Engineers still aren't sure what caused the problem, but they think Simpson's
phone was constantly transmitting signals to a "set-up channel'' on a cellular
phone tower behind Crystal River's City Hall. The channel is supposed to take
signals and relay them to their destinations.

Simpson's phone, however, sent signals to the channel even when he wasn't
trying to make a call. Whenever his phone was on, the constant signal
prevented any cellular phone user from making a call via that tower.

GTE Wireless spent days in Crystal River trying to figure out what was causing
the outage before tracking the faulty signal to Simpson's cellular phone. They
used the same technology cellular phone companies use to track stolen cell
phones.

Full Story: http://www.foxmarketwire.com/wires/0115/f_ap_0115_53.sml


--
Rob Raisch, Internet Hired Gun <http://www.raisch.com/>
  and author of the run-away NY-Times best-seller:
     The Idiot's Guide to Chicken Soup for the Soul
     for Dummies in a Nutshell