The national frequency agency reports a very strange investigation carried out in Messanges, where mobile telephony and the Internet no longer worked between midnight and three o’clock in the morning.
The National Frequency Agency (ANFR) monitors wave emissions. Among its missions is the control of jammers, devices whose use, like detention, are prohibited on our territory. Except that… the agency recently received an unusual complaint from a mobile phone operator. “This jamming affected telephony and internet services in all mobile frequency bands in the town of Messanges, in the Landes. The disturbance never occurred before midnight and most often ceased around 3 a.m., every day of the week, without exception» . What could generate such a disturbance at times when the whole town is sleeping?
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The ANFR agent then turns into a real detective. Imagine him walking through deserted, sleepy streets, not with a magnifying glass and an old Sherlock Holmes-style pipe in his hand, but with sharp equipment, including a direction finder – the telecoms version of the dowsing stick.
The twelve strokes of midnight sound. At the foot of the mobile operator’s site, the investigator “scrutinizes the screen of the spectrum analyzer of his laboratory vehicle“. Suddenly, the data panics, the curves get carried away. No doubt, a wave jammer is in action. A wave jammer, for the ANFR, is an elephant in a porcelain store, a football player who scores with his hand.
To great ills, great remedies
The hunt can begin. Dowsing stick, or rather direction finder in hand, off he goes, tracing the signal back to the source. A house. But at 1:30 a.m., he can’t act. It was only after he himself had taken a few hours of sleep that the vigilante of the waves went to the scene of the crime. And there, surprise.
” The occupant of the premises recognized without complex that he was indeed using a jammer bought on the internet! The device in question even turned out to be a multiband jammer, capable of neutralizing both mobile telephony and WiFi“, explains the ANFR. But why use such a weapon? What purpose? A sordid motive?
No, none of that. Only a father annoyed by teenagers who are a little too focused on the net. To be sure that his children sleep and do not surf on social networks, he had simply decided to equip himself with a jammer. Bad idea. Very bad even, sincethe equipment was not only blurring the inside of its housing. He seriously disrupted all telephony and mobile internet in the area around his home, depriving not only his children but also his neighbours, the inhabitants of his municipality and the neighboring municipality of a good mobile connection!“. By wanting to ban the internet in his home, he applied the same sentence to all his neighborhood.
“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[[. The ANFR agent, in addition to demanding that he turn off the jammer and no longer use it, reminded the owner of the equipment of the regulatory framework. He also had to pay an intervention fee of 450 euros“, reports the ANFR.
Morality: if your teenagers spend too much time on their smartphones, the easiest way is to confiscate the offending devices. The author of these lines does not do otherwise: the telephones come out of the rooms for the night. And the computers don’t have WiFi access during sleeping hours – you can never be too careful.
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