Is your cell phone automatically in communication and tracked by cell towers all over the world? I can’t believe that every tower across the globe would try to ping your phone when you are called my a peer. So it must know where you are, right?
How often does a cell phone send out a squawk to the cell towers? What else is involved that I’m missing.
Thanks.
Does my cell phone company keep track of me wherever I go? - The Straight Dope Cecil commented on this a while back if you want to give it a quick read.
Cell phones call out every few minutes. I can hear the signals of mine through the speakers of my computer. I can also hear incoming calls before the phone rings.
Yup. I briefly attached some external speakers to my computer at work a while back. Disconnected them after a few days because it was just too distracting picking up interference from people’s cell phones nearby (I’m sure I could have got better speakers that probably wouldn’t have had that problem, but since my internal speakers didn’t suffer from that problem I didn’t bother investigating further).
What really impresses me is that my wife gets off a plane in New Zealand, and within a few seconds, has connected to a network, and then received the text I sent from the UK previously.
So she has registered with a local provider, that provider has notified her UK carrier, and the UK carrier has passed on a pending SMS message. All the way to the other side of the earth. That is advanced technology/magic.
Si
I think a lot of people, but most specially younger people, do not appreciate and have no idea of all the technology and work which goes into things like this working. We think Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and that’s it but that invention was pretty much useless until many more additional things were invented and millions of man hours were spent building infrastructre and automatic switches etc. The basic telephone is the least part of all that. Millions of phones have to be set up, connected and switching equipment has to work so that you can dial the number you want to talk to.
With cell phones it is even much more complex. The emount of technology is just astounding. every small part of the system is incredibly complex. Millions of man-hours have been spent inventing, developing, designing and building all the networks and infrastructure so that a horny teenager for a few cents can call his girlfriend where ever they each happen to be.
I often say that we do not realize how lucky we are. We benefit from millions of hours of work from other people. This is true in telecommunications, medicine, transportation, etc. We need to learn to appreciate all this.