Salah Hamza, CEO of Nilesat, said even opposition groups are engaged in jamming.
He said the Arab spring has set off the new trend of jamming, which for years was done only by Iran in the Middle East.
“Jamming now occurs from Bahrain, Kuwait, Syria and, of course, Iran,” he said at a conference in Washington, DC. “We have pro-government jammers, as well as opposition jammers.”
In early March, he said, “we had jamming from a very sophisticated source, generating 30 dBW of signal power, which obliterates everything else on a transponder…. Indeed, this case was quite ridiculous because even after we had removed all of the channels from the transponder, which is a huge headache for us and our customers, the jamming continued onto an empty transponder.”
He said the jamming now was often coming from one Arab country aimed against another Arab country.
“We now even have what we call voluntary self-jamming, where, in order to curb unwanted signals coming into a country, it seems that a nation is prepared to also lose its own signals,” he said.
Meanwhile, in London, the BBC said its Persian service recently came under its most sustained attack yet. BBC Director General Mark Thompson said, “There was a day recently when there was a simultaneous attempt to jam two different satellite feeds of BBC Persian into Iran, to disrupt the service’s London phone lines by the use of multiple automatic calls, and a sophisticated cyber attack on the BBC [website].”