Why did all our cellphones just die?

[Ms2001]

@StarsApart

I had only tried to make one call on it

You say “tried”. Did it actually work? If you had no service out where you were camping, that could explain the problem all by itself. When your phone is searching for service, it uses more battery power than when it has found service and knows exactly how much power it needs to transmit with. A lot of phones will shut off after searching for a certain amount of time, because searching all night runs down your battery.

@Q.E.D.

One of the first multiplexing schemes was an analog method called TDMA, for Time Division Multiple Access, and was based on an older multiplexing technique used in landline telephone network backbones for putting hundreds of phone calls on a few pairs of wires. […] CDMA is being largely supplanted by yet another technology called GSM, for Global System for Mobile (communications), but I won’t bore you with the details.

There’s digital TDMA too. Before AT&T Wireless and Cingular (now the same company) offered GSM, they had digital TDMA. In fact, GSM is a TDMA system - it’s not compatible with the other one, but it divides each frequency into timeslices. I believe Nextel’s iDEN is also a TDMA system.

And, in point of fact, PCS and GSM systems aren’t even “true” cellular systems anymore. PCS phones, for example, try to connect to not one, but at least three different towers at the same time, which is supposed to reduce dropped calls by ensuring you alwys have an available connection.

This is a feature of CDMA, not the frequency band (“PCS” refers to the 1900 MHz band, and “cellular” to the 800 MHz band, not that most people use the terms that way). It’s called “soft handoff”, and I wasn’t aware GSM had anything similar.