Here's a post for those of you who are regularly in meeting rooms with conference call equipment: I've been doing this for years but these days I am often in a meeting room with conference equipment that is particularly susceptible to the typical GSM interference that all of you have probably heard already when you were close to a radio set in the car or at home. No matter where I put the phone, sooner or later there's some interference heard from new e-mails coming in, etc.
But there's a simple solution for that: Just put your phone into 3G mode and there's no more interference. That's because when transferring data over a 3G link the uplink is not switched-on or -off all the time like in GSM but remains active. As it's the power up/down that can be heard in a receiver that is close by, that pretty much solves the issue. Also, the transmission power is spread over a 5 MHz channel instead of only a 200 kHz channel.
So instead of only switching to silent mode when going into a meeting, I'll also switch to 3G from now on. And for those who are wondering why I use 2G for my mobile instead of having both networks enabled and allow the mobile to choose automatically: My N95 for which I haven't yet found a worthy successor still has a chipset that uses significantly more power in 3G mode. And in addition, browsing the net on my way to and from work with OperaMini is much smoother when no 3G/2G fallbacks occur when the train goes through a 2G only area.