How does a mobile phone network work?
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Every day thousands of calls are made in France from a mobile phone. Allowing to stay in touch easily and almost everywhere, the smartphone works with a complex mobile phone network. The University of Lille 1 and Unisciel explain its secrets on video in this episode of Kézako.
Every day thousands of calls are made in France from a mobile phone. Allowing to stay in touch easily and almost everywhere, the smartphone works however with a complex mobile phone network. The University of Lille 1 and Unisciel explain its secrets on video in this episode of Kézako.
Every mobile phone is first and foremost a transducer, which means that it will first capture the voice of its user and then transform it into digital data. This information is relayed to the central office by a dense network of telephone antennas and then reaches the recipient.
The real complexity lies in managing the relay system. The antennas can only serve about 60 users, which is relatively few compared to the number of simultaneous calls that can be made in the effective area of an antenna. To do this, operators sometimes pool their antennas in order to densify the network and thus provide better coverage.