An excess of vigilance that could be costly. By using a signal jammer to control his children’s internet browsing, a father has simply managed to mistakenly remove the connectivity of an entire city.
This misadventure, told by the National Frequency Agency, was made public following a complaint filed by an operator. It has indeed detected strange signal drops not without causing a significant impact on the telephone and Internet services of the inhabitants of the town of Messanges, in the Landes department.
“A detail intrigued our investigators: the disturbance never occurred before midnight and most often ceased around 3 a.m., every day of the week, without exception”, says the frequency policeman, commissioned by the operator to do light on this incident. Members of the Toulouse regional service of the ANFR were therefore dispatched to the scene to survey the streets of the sleeping city in search of the origin of the incident. As he watched his clock strike twelve, a member of the team saw his spectrum analyzer equipment light up: the source of the jamming was nearby!
An incident with serious consequences
Following his device, his steps led him to a house in a nearby town. The next day, one of the residents admitted his responsibility and revealed that he had bought a multi-band jammer to prevent his teenage children from going online at night without permission. The father said his teenagers had become “addicted” to social media and web browsing since the start of the pandemic and the increase in confinement measures.
And to explain: the jammer was intended to prevent them from secretly using their smartphones to connect to the Internet when they were supposed to have already fallen into the arms of Morpheus for some time already. Far from stopping at this single mission, the jammer had nevertheless managed to wreak havoc in his neighborhood, by cutting internet access throughout the city. “By wanting to ban the internet in his house, he applied the same sentence to his entire neighborhood,” the agency said.
If the incident is closed, it could cost the jammer dearly. “Today, this father of a family faces legal proceedings, the illicit possession and use of a jammer being both subject to a criminal penalty of up to 6 months imprisonment and 30,000 fine euros”, indeed concludes the ANFR. Enough to make you think twice before thinking about applying the drastic means to cut off your children’s internet.