Hotels Putting Up Illegal Mobile Phone Jammers

from the that-can't-be-good dept

Tue, Aug 26th 2003 12:10pm — Mike Masnick

We've written about how excessive in-room phone charges are a scam that many hotels run, which was increasingly being undercut by folks using their mobile phones instead. Many hotels responded by increasing the fees they charged to the few guests who had no mobile phones to use (yes, this is a backwards move). Now, some are resorting to even shadier solutions. Found over at textually.org comes the news that (at least in Scotland) hotels are buying up illegal mobile phone jammers which make mobile phone users believe they have no service in their rooms - forcing them to use the hotel phones. First off, I wonder how prevalent it really is. The "source" for the story is the guy selling the devices, who has every incentive in the world to hype up how well he's doing. More importantly, businesses that go ahead and install such devices are coming up with a short-term solution that's going to hurt in the long term. As so many travelers rely so heavily on their mobile phones, finding a hotel that seems to not have mobile phone service at all will only make a large percentage of business travelers cross that hotel off the list of hotels they'll stay at in the future. There's no shortage of competition, and offering customers what they want might go a bit further than making a few extra bucks on long distance phone calls.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

6 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

dorpus, 26 Aug 2003 @ 5:25pm

Degrees of market freedom
In a truly free market, suppliers have the power to set prices regardless of what an Econ 101 textbook says the theoretical price should be.

The market for a place to stay is, theoretically, a perfectly competitive market -- one need only Craig's list to find plenty of people offering places to stay for the night. The reality is that people do prefer the predictable environment of a hotel setting.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Can You Hear Me Now ?, 27 Aug 2003 @ 8:52am
  
  Re: Degrees of market freedom
  But I think the problem is that people are being fooled into believing they do not have service ...
  Thats dishonesty.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Mike, 15 May 2006 @ 9:23pm

I think I'm sick of this crap. How about thinking what we would like and maybe that would get us to come to your hotel? :O! OMG THATS SUCH A BAD IDEA. >_>
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
ooocf, 18 Mar 2007 @ 5:00pm

e
reserve this one
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Matt, 18 Apr 2007 @ 11:53am

Re: Degrees of market freedom by Can You Hear Me N
I agree. Any business cutting people's phones off for no reason but to force them to use a hotel's high-priced landline is wrong. However, I feel jammers have a legitimate place when used sparingly by users and ONLY when needed. For example, many 'big' jammers offer metres of range and transmit many watts of power. Others, such as this portable unit: http://www.techgadgetz.com/cjama.htm , claim to only emit mW, not Watts! I think these types of low-powered portable devices should be available to all who want to silence jabbering maniacs on their phones, while not wanting to interfere with communications farther away from their immediate vicinity. In short, if for personal use, go for it. If it's used just to 'force' someone to make a high-priced phone call, then that's just wrong.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
geoff, 29 Feb 2008 @ 1:37pm

phone jammer
Great site with info on phone jammers

cell phone jammer
[ link to this | view in chronology ]