Is Bush Locking Down Mobile Phones At APEC?

Despite reports from the government in April that mobile phone calls and text messages would be blocked in the vicinity of President George W Bush as an anti-terrorism measure during APEC, the telecommunications industry seems to be in the dark about the issue, saying their networks have remained fully-functional.

While Bush arrived in Sydney last night and has been travelling around the city today – almost the entire Northern city-centre has been shut-down along with Darling Harbour – three major mobile phone carriers have denied users on their systems have experienced problems.

“We haven’t had any issues at all on our network. It’s been running smoothly since Bush arrived. We don’t know anything about that, sorry,” an Optus spokesperson in corporate affairs told SmartHouse News.

President Bush’s motorcade – an entourage of armoured cars – was meant to be followed by a helicopter equipped with signal-jamming equipment that locked mobile transmission, no matter the network, from an area approximately the size of a football field around the motorcade, according to reports from News Limited before the conference began.

Remote-controlled bombs killing thousands in Iraq and in the second Bali bomb attacks were detonated using mobile phones, a risk which President Bush is not prepared to take – the signal-jamming technology was first used by the president at the 2005 APEC meeting in South Korea.

According to Telstra News Services representative, Brent Hooley, a service provider’s equipment might not pick up an outage such as a signal-jam, since the network around the moving president would be down only temporarily.

“We haven’t had anything like that [mobile outages] unless there are some sort of security systems put in place by the government that jam phones while a motorgabe is going past. In which case, we wouldn’t necessarily be able to track that,” he told SmartHouse News.

An unnamed representative from Vodafone said she hadn’t heard of the Vodafone network failing, while hardware providers Nokia and Blackberry both said they hadn’t heard any reports from customers that their phones had been down.

“I’ve not heard anything at all,” said Nokia Australia communications manager, Louise Ingram.