[rhino42]

While this sounds like a good idea on the surface, it won't work.

Pretty much all cellular communications nowadays uses CDMA of one flavor or another. An important property of CDMA is that any signal that I send to the tower actually causes more noise for the other users in the network. This id called being interference limited. For this reason, there is a ton of effort going into power control, so that reach user sends just enough power to reach the tower but not more. Your cell phone COULD boost it's transmit power to reach the tower, but it would ruin everyone else's connection.

[eurleif]

So what's to stop people from hacking their cell phones to break things for everyone else?

[rhino42]

Cell towers can detect the receive power of any given cell phone on their network. If you just hacked your cell phone to use high transmit strength, they would know and could kick you off their network.

I can imagine that you could rig your cell phone (or another device) to transmit at high power to jam the connection, but the FCC would have something to say about it. If you're caught, I'd expect civil and criminal reprisals...

[bdonlan]

Stiff fines. If suddenly the only signal the tower's picking up is yours, it doesn't take too long to figure out who is responsible.

[eurleif]

Prepaid phone, bought with cash, and left in a public place?

[bdonlan]

If you keep it up it can be triangulated, I suppose. Other than that, the tower would have to shift everyone to a different frequency.