The FCC crackdown of 2012

All jamming units in the US have been banned 90 years in the past — lengthy earlier than jamming units even existed. The Communications Act of 1934 explicitly prohibited deliberate interference with radio communications.

Each cellphone and GPS jamming works by “flooding the zone” with white noise in the identical frequencies as cellphone and GPS receivers, principally a denial-of-service assault on the related vary of radio frequencies. However it was the rise in e-commerce that fueled an trade of on-line jammer gross sales. In 2012, a bus passenger in Philadelphia wished some peace and quiet, so he used a cellphone jammer to jam all of the telephones on the bus. Later that 12 months, the FCC took authorized motion towards 20 on-line retailers in 12 states for illegally promoting jamming units. 

Regardless of the crackdown, the unlawful use of jammers continued. In 2013, RNM Manufacturing in Houston, TX  used a jammer to dam staff from utilizing their telephones at work and was fined $29,250. To not be out-done by Houston, a Dallas firm in 2022 known as Ravi’s Import Warehouse additionally tried to jam worker calls and was additionally fined by the FCC, this time for $22,000.