9/7/04 NYT -- The Cellphone That Doesn't Work at the Hotel.
September 7, 2004
The Cellphone That Doesn't Work at the Hotel
By CHRISTOPHER ELLIOTT
As a frequent guest at a Salt Lake City Hampton Inn, Murray
Trepel often finds himself powering down his cellphone and
picking up the house phone.
"My cellphone seldom works anywhere near the hotel," said
Mr. Trepel, the senior manager for a call-center service
provider in Logan, Utah. "Not just in my room, but in the
parking lot as well."
What is going on? Mr. Trepel, like many business travelers
who depend on uninterrupted service from their wireless
company, has a long list of probable culprits - including
the building's architecture, the area's geography and the
cellphone industry's erratic coverage.
But another theory is starting to gain traction among
business travelers: hotels are blocking the signals.
They would certainly have the motive. Cellphones have taken
a huge bite out of their earnings. Thanks largely to the
preponderance of portables, the profits from in-room phones
dropped 76 percent in four years, sliding from $644 an
available room in 2000 to $152 last year, according to the
hotel consulting firm PKF in San Francisco.
Analysts say the high fixed cost of maintaining in-room
phones increased the losses. The downturn accounted for 10
percentage points of the hotel industry's 36 percent
decline in profits during the same period. "Hotels are
unhappy about that lost profit," said Robert Mandelbaum,
PKF's director of research.
But are they so unhappy that they are biting back? No way,
say hotel representatives. For starters, they point out,
cellphone-blocking devices are illegal in the United
States.
"It would also hurt our customers, and it's something we
would never do," said Courtnie Widerburg, the general
manager of the Salt Lake City Hampton Inn. Besides, her
property already offers free local calls and high-speed
Internet access, and its franchise agreement limits how
much it can bill for long-distance service, she said.
Not only that, but hard evidence is scant that hotels are
using jammers - at least in the United States. Last year, a
Scottish newspaper reported that phone jammers were being
sold to hotels in the United Kingdom as tools for
increasing revenue from in-room phones.
"Harassed by mobile phones or hotel phone system not being
used?" asked one of the promotional leaflets distributed to
the properties. "Then look no further. Purchase a mobile
phone jammer for your hotel, restaurant and bar. Small and
discreet."
A reporter from the newspaper, The Record, posed as a
bed-and-breakfast owner and bought a jammer and a battery
pack for about $135. The man who sold the gadget to him,
the reporter said, told him, "I've sold quite a few to
hotels and bed and breakfasts."
Loreen Haim-Cayzer, the director of marketing and sales for
Netline Communications Technologies in Tel Aviv,
acknowledged that her company had sold hundreds of
cellphone jammers to hotels around the world. But asked if
any of them were in the United States, Ms. Haim-Cayzer said
she could not disclose the identity of clients.
Still, suspicions persist. Joseph Palermo, a corporate
pilot for a home-improvement company, spent almost a month
at a Courtyard property in Secaucus, N.J., recently, and he
wondered whether it might be using a jammer.
"While I was there, my cellphone worked terribly," he said.
"Sometimes I would have to dial three or four times to
place a call. Then I would have to hold my head just right
to hear who I was talking to. You would think that being
across the river from one of the biggest cities in the
world, the phone would work well."
Melissa Thompson, a spokeswoman for Interstate Hotels &
Resorts, the hotel-management company that runs the
Courtyard, said the hotel was not blocking wireless calls.
"We would never infringe on anyone's rights to use a
cellphone for the sake of making a few extra dollars," she
said. But she acknowledged that cellphones did not always
work on the property, particularly in hard-to-reach areas
like the elevator.
"I can understand that some guests would be frustrated,"
she said. "I can understand that they would be suspicious."
The doubts are not limited to guests. When a recent
PricewaterhouseCoopers survey showed the number of calls
made from hotel room phones had fallen by 40 percent in the
last four years, the firm's lodging consultants wondered
whether hotels were fighting back by investing in wireless
jamming technology.
An investigation, however, turned up nothing. "It's
possible that there are hotels using cellphone jammers,"
said Bjorn Hanson, a PricewaterhouseCoopers hotel analyst.
"But we couldn't find them."
Then again, it is nearly impossible to prove that jamming
technology is being used. "If you turn your phone on and it
says 'no service,' then that's the only hint that you're
being jammed," said Barry Zellen, editor of
Technologyinnovator.com, a Web site that covers wireless
security issues. "If you're in an area that has good
coverage and you pull into a hotel driveway, and suddenly
there's a dead zone, then you can probably speculate that
there's something unnatural going on."
Adding to the intrigue is the fact that the Federal
Communications Commission, which could easily sniff out a
blocker with its direction-finding equipment, has never
issued a fine for the use of a cellphone jammer, according
to an agency spokesman.
Not everyone sees that as proof that the devices are not in
use. "The F.C.C. rule prohibiting cellphone jammers is
unenforced," said Howard Melamed, the chief executive of
the CellAntenna Corporation, a cellular-communications
technology company in Coral Springs, Fla.
At the same time, consumer complaints to the F.C.C. about
telecommunications service quality, a catch-all category
that includes possible cellular-blocking devices, busy
signals and roaming service, surged to 704 in the fourth
quarter of last year, the latest period for which numbers
were available, from 450 in the first quarter.
"If you do the math, if you connect the dots, it's obvious
that these cellphone jammers are catching on," said Mr.
Zellen of Technologyinnovator. "Especially in the hotel
industry."
The companies that sell the devices are understandably
tight-lipped about their clients. Mike Menage, the chief
executive of Global Gadget, a Worthing, England, seller of
jamming equipment, insists he has no idea whether any
hotels have bought his devices.
But he admits the motive is there. "Hotels want them to
either cut down on disturbance to the other guests or, more
likely, to increase hotel revenue by forcing the guests to
use the in-house hotel telephones for external calls," he
said.
Practically speaking, jamming an entire hotel would not be
easy. Mr. Melamed of CellAntenna, which sells legal jamming
devices to the government, says that the cheap hand-held
jammers sold by mail order have too short a range to do the
trick. He estimates that a small hotel would have to spend
at least $25,000 to block all cellphone transmissions,
while a larger operation, like a conference center or a big
chain hotel, might be looking at a bill of $35,000 to
$50,000.
Instead of intentionally interfering with transmissions,
Mr. Melamed said, he believes hotels remain conveniently
neutral.
"The hotel doesn't have to go to extremes to stop people's
calls from going through, because there's already
interference caused by the building or there's just a weak
signal," he said. Properties could easily install so-called
repeater systems to help a cellular signal penetrate every
room in a hotel. But why spend money on something that is
going to reduce your revenues?
In the end, most hotel guests shrug off their suspicions
and find someone else to blame. Mr. Trepel, the Utah senior
manager who could not connect from the Hampton Inn, said he
ultimately faulted his wireless carriers. "I walked up and
down the street, and I had the same problems," he said.
Whether they think a hotel is tinkering with their wireless
transmissions or not, experienced business travelers
usually have a contingency plan. "Anybody smarter than a
pineapple knows that cellphones do not and never have
worked everywhere, and that hotel long-distance charges
have always been outrageous," said Ed Barrett, a software
upgrade specialist in Flanders, N.J. "So you just go out
and buy a phone card, and you carry it everywhere you go.
And then you use it when your cellphone doesn't work.''
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company. |
