Jammers Offer Solution to Cell Phone Disturbances

WASHINGTON, March 9, 2005 — -- Cell phone use is so prominent in the United States that industry experts project that by the end of this year more Americans will be using cell phones than land line telephones.

At most public places -- restaurants, places of worship, movie theaters and Broadway theatrical productions -- inconsiderate people are instructed to refrain from using their cell phones at inappropriate times.

A cottage industry has sprung up to devise creative ways to remind audiences to shut their phones off, ranging from the "Inconsiderate Cell Phone Man" shorts shown before movies at Loew's and Regal theaters to the moment during the Broadway show "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" when a member of the cast tells the audience in character that she "would just like to take this minute to ask you to turn off your cell phones, pagers, beepers -- whatever you have that might make noise and distract our spellers."

That still doesn't always work. Recently, during the weepy climax of Billy Crystal's one-man Broadway show "700 Sundays," a cell phone went off -- despite two such warnings. Crystal came out after the show, as reported in The New York Post, and thanked the audience, "except for the man or the lady who in the end let that cell phone go off. Please, next time shut it off, or better yet ... ." Crystal ended with a colorfully worded instruction suggesting where the caller could put the offending cell phone.

In that way, cell phones have become the bane of the creative world. "What you're doing in a show, especially live theater, is you're trying really hard to create this world so that when the people are sitting there in their theater seats they get lost in the world that you are in," said Lisa Howard, the actress who delivers the warning line in "Putnam County Spelling Bee." A cell phone ringing "takes everyone in the room out of it and we have to fight to get them back."

"It's terribly selfish, and I wish that there were ways to prevent it," said Frank Lombardi, production stage manager for the Broadway musical "Hairspray."

One form of prevention is cell-phone jammers -- devices that broadcast a signal on the same frequencies as cell phones, blocking transmissions. Smaller devices block calls in a user's immediate area; bigger jammers cover a radius of almost a mile.