When inside a large group of people (at a stadium, concert, festival), why does your phones internet data stop working despite having full bars? Why does such a large presence of phones in one area limit every phones’ usability and ability to even simply send a text message?
In: Technology
Here’s another stadium related analogy… the stadium is designed to accommodate the capacity they let it. There are enough seats, they have sightlines, there are many bathrooms and food stands. You can easily and quickly get to your seat as the flow of people is spread out. This is why you see 5 bars — the overall system can handle the capacity and proximity.
Now, you know how that huge crowd of people come to a slow crawl when all trying to exit the stadium at the same time? Suddenly, the system that could handle the overall capacity bogs down when everybody wants the same thing. This is why you get no/slow data even with 5 bars.
Bars only represent the strength of the signal you’re receiving. It does not show you the congestion level of the cellular band or how overloaded a cell site is with everyone’s phone trying to talk at once.
Could anyone explain why I (with Verizon) could barely send a text, meanwhile my friend (with ATT) had no problem texting and uploading a photo.
What it means to have internet service is that a cell tower can exchange data with your phone. You can think of this like a pipe that’s sending 1’s and 0’s back and forth with your phone. Each cell tower only has a certain number of pipelines it can handle. If there are too many people in one area the cell tower will have to move pipelines between different people which slows down how fast your data can be exchanged. Think of watering plants. If you only have one plant you can just point the hose there and continually pump water. If you have 1000’s of plants and you’re constantly switching which plant you’re watering each plant will get water slower overall.
Cell phones are just fancy radios. When it comes down to it, just like only one thing can be broadcast to your car radio on each “channel”, cell phone radios have the same limitations, but with a lot of fancy work to let them manage and share the same space without getting in each other’s way.
Imagine a room where a few people upfront are answering questions and have megaphones, and when you want to ask a question you ring a quick bell that doesn’t interfere (too badly) with the people currently talking, but just letting them know to get to you when they are next available. Now, if there are way to many people trying to do that at the same time? The people at the front just get a chorus of bells ringing constantly and can’t hear the questioners and so the “system” grinds to a halt. You can still hear the megaphones just fine (you have good signal strength) but they can’t get any connections completed because then questioners can’t be heard over all of the people indicating they want a connection when’d one becomes available.
The solution to this is to break people down into different rooms so that they don’t interfere with each other. As more and more people use cell phones, companies have been making each station smaller, so that those same bands (or channels) can be reused by someone else farther away. Radio stations do this too, but need hundreds of miles separating the channels, which is why each city has different channels in use to not interfere with neighboring ones.
But once you get down to a very very small area like a stadium, the signals from one side can still reach most other users in the stadium, so you can’t reuse frequencies once you get down to that smallest area and everyone has to share the exact same spectrum. Everyone is stuck in the same room together that wasn’t designed to take that many questions all at once and adding more speakers or bigger megaphones doesn’t help at all.
One of the main advantages of the next generation of cell service, 5g, is that it *doesn’t* carry far at all, and will help break those minimum sized crowded rooms up into smaller ones because you can use frequencies that don’t get interference or connections from even 200 ft away, and so you can put a ton of stations out that only talk to the people in each section of the stadium, kind of similar to how Wi-Fi can handle very dense populations at conventions by having tons and tons of shorter range devices each serving a small chunk of the total.
Everyone in the stadium (phones) can hear the announcer (tower) over the crowd, and the announcer can hear the crowd itself, but she can’t hear any of your individual conversations.
Think of bars as lanes on a highway. 5 bars = 5 lanes open. 1 bar = 1 lane open.
Now, during rush hour even when 5 lanes are open, traffic is usually at a standstill. Same with data, it’s a data-jam basically.
The number of bars tells you how close the cell tower is. But the cell tower can only handle so many phones. If it can handle 1000 phones and 20000 people are in the stadium, most will get no useful service.
Full bars represent your close proximity to a cell tower.
But so is everyone else at the stadium/festival.
The difference is like you taking a crap in your toilet and 100 people trying to crap in a toilet at the same time. Sure, you are close to the toilet but good luck getting your crap through.
There is a finite uplink speed from the cell tower that feeds the stadium. Whether it is 2 gbps or 20 gbps, the carrier’s business decision is going to be to provide the best service at the most likely volume of traffic demand. If a huge game exceeds that demand, there’s no quick solution that will relieve the issue. The uplink speed is what it is.
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