this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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People used to say the same about cellphones.
I remember one episode where a girl in the bus was texting and some old lady got up to tell her that "it will go into the engine". The old lady was terrified.
That reminds me of something.
Also on a bus. There was a group of girls on the bus and they were having a big loud argument about whether or not one of the group would receive a text from her partner or friend or whatever because "how would the text know where they were, as the bus is moving".
A valid question. Luckily a lot of work has been done to address it.
Pretty much the first thing that needed to be solved when moving from 1-way pagers to 2-way phones. Pagers could just get a broadcast analog signal and determine themselves if they were the intended recipient. 2-way needed more bandwidth and a dedicated communication channel to a specific device, so broadcast wasn't feasible. Thus, phones would send a registration signal that a tower would pick up, and that specific tower would handle all communication to that phone. If another tower got the registration signal, communication would switch to that tower.
Interestingly enough, there was a period (for a fairly long time) that if you were travelling too fast, you could either a) not be able to register on a network, or b) overwhelm the network with registrations - part of the reason why phones had to be turned off on airplanes