The owner of a bar in England installed a Faraday cage for blocking cellular communication in an institution

He decided to return to the visitors the joy of communicating with each other.

For several years , the owner of a cocktail bar in East Sussex watched his clients practically do not communicate with each other, bumping into the display of the phone immediately upon arrival at the establishment. Even friendly companies turned into a bunch of loners after getting phones from their pockets and bags.

Steve Tyler, the name of the bar owner, decided to return to the good old days. For this, he installed a metal net in the walls and ceiling of the bar, which blocks the signal of the cellular tower, preventing it from going further. The network reliably blocked the signal of the cellular network, so it became pointless to use a smartphone or a tablet with a 3G module at the bar. Neither talk nor stumble. According to Mr. Tyler, this step allowed visitors to his bar to “become part of the real world” and recall other people.

What the bar owner installed is the Faraday cage . This is a system invented by the English physicist and chemist Michael Faraday in 1836 to screen equipment from external electromagnetic fields. Typically, such a system is a grounded cell made of well-conducting material.
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It protects only from the electric field, the static magnetic field penetrates inside the cell. In the high-frequency region, the action of such a screen is based on the reflection of electromagnetic waves from the screen surface and the attenuation of high-frequency energy in its thickness due to heat losses due to eddy currents.

The cage Tyler created is not perfect in his own words. It consists of silver foil and copper wire netting. And although the reliability of the system is not 100%, visitors still lost the ability to communicate by phone. Instead, according to Tyler, they began to talk to each other.

Tyler chose this method of blocking the signal of cellular and wireless networks because cellular suppression systems, usually called “jammers,” are illegal. They are banned not only in the UK, but also in the United States. Not long ago, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) punished a resident of the state of Florida, USA, who used a powerful jammer on the road. He hid the device under the seat of his Toyota Highlander.



In the same year, a 63-year-old resident of Chicago was convicted and sentenced to a fine for using such a device on a train since 2014. Catch him had longer than Humphreys. And the problem was that the owner of the jammer could jam not only people's everyday conversations, but also calls to the rescue service and the police. The suspect was discovered when he drowned out the connection on the phone of a nearby plain-clothes police officer.

One would expect people to complain about the owner of the bar, where they obviously cannot use the phone. But no, the only complaint came from a man who noticed that his phone was working. And he was transplanted to another table where the signal was completely blocked. According to Tyler, the installation of the Faraday cage is not prohibited by law. This is a passive, not an active way to suppress the cellular signal. Tyler's words are confirmed by a representative from Ofcom: “Unlike silencers, the Faraday cage is passive, although it affects the reception of the signal.”



“Mobile phones have become a part of our life, and if we go to a bar, club or other place, we often take cellular phones with us. But phones are an asocial factor, ”says Steve Tyler.

There are retro-telephones installed on the tables, on which customers can place an order or communicate with other clients of the establishment.