Wednesday, October 14, 2009

How mobile networks work

Mobile phones work by converting voice, text, multi-media messages or data calls into radio waves or radio frequencies (RF).

Mobile phone base stations transmit and receive these calls - and connect callers to other phones and other networks.

Mobile phone networks are divided into thousands of overlapping, individual geographic areas or ‘cells’, each with a base station.

The size of a cell depends on the area of coverage that’s needed and the number of calls that are made in that area. So, the smallest cells, i.e. more base stations, are where there is the biggest demand which is usually in crowded urban settings with high buildings and heavy population density, but the biggest cells tend to be in rural areas, where people are dispersed over a wider, less built up, area.

When a mobile phone caller is on the move, calls are automatically routed from a base station in one cell to a base station in another, thus providing the best signal and available capacity.

How do we minimise the chance of you being cut off?

We ensure that there is an adequate number of base stations in a particular area to reduce the chances of the signal being interrupted or the call 'dropped'.

Dropped calls is one of the performance measures used by the regulator to measure the quality of our network, which is used to carry our customers' calls.

Diagram of how mobile networks work

Some mobile phones also use radio waves to enable them to connect to wireless LANs (Wi-Fi) and Bluetooth devices.

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