Abstract: In spread spectrum systems, such as CDMA-based systems, the presence of even narrow-band interference, such as that caused by jamming at a particular frequency, can adversely affect all of the current users in the system. According to the present invention, interference is detected and characterized by accumulating statistics for each energy spectrum in the system (e.g., for both the forward link band and the reverse link band in a telecommunication system). In particular, since a spread spectrum is ideally flat across the entire frequency band, narrow-band interference can be detected based on a significant deviation between the signal strength at any one frequency and the average signal level across the entire band. Similarly, wide-band interference can be detected based on the variance level over the entire frequency band. In a preferred embodiment, a pair of receivers are designed to perform background interference-detection processing for both the forward and reverse link.