Mobile phone usage

Wednesday, January 7th, 2008

Common sense at last! It seems that we are on our way to allowing the use of mobile phones in hospitals. Like so many prohibitions on mobile phones, I always questioned the ban on the basis that no one ever showed that the phones shared the frequencies of other equipment or their harmonics. It's all basic physics and a drone could work it out.

I suspect commercial factors came into play here. Bedside pay phones and aircraft phones are bloody expensive and we could only be persuaded to use them by depriving us of other means of communication. I never saw any science in all this.

Same with the explosions in gas stations which I referred to in an earlier blog. Lighting petrol requires thermal energy and phones ain't got enough and for that matter, neither do cigarettes although I concede that the match or lighter may have.

I have always believed that mobile phones posed little threat to other equipment given that frequencies are allocated internationally. Their biggest threat is annoyance and that is something we have to live with.