There midnight Of New Year’s it’s one of those moments in which everyone – or almost everyone – picks up the phone to write a message of good wishes to loved ones, friends and relatives. And it is precisely at that moment that ours can happen cell phone performance will worsenpreventing us from texting or calling. But why does it happen on New Year’s Eve? The answer lies in saturation from the telephone cells, the same reason why ai concerts, at the stadium or more generally in very crowded areas the phone suddenly stops working.
On New Year’s Eve we all communicate together: cell phone saturation
Have you ever wondered how our smartphones communicate with each other? Yes, it’s thanks to telephone networkwhich we can imagine just as one invisible network that covers and divides the space around us. The network is in fact made up of a series of antennas which form a lattice that divides space into sectors called cells.
When we move in space, our smartphone passes by from one cell to another and it comes so adequately managed by the network. Clearly, however, the cells do not have an infinite capacity, but they are capable of managing a maximum amount of traffic incoming or outgoing. For this reason, there are situations in which it can happen that a cell Yes saturated:
- when the quantity of devices inside a cell increases suddenly, for example during concerts or events
- when for the same number of mobile phones connected, the amount of traffic inside a cell increases suddenly until it is saturated, as in the case of New Year’s.
In the second case, the quantity of devices connected simultaneously to the same cell is certainly relevant, but it is not necessary for them to be a particularly high number: the saturation derives from the fact that all these devices are activated for communicate at the same timemaking communications almost impossible.
Network overload
Therefore, whether by number of devices connected to the same cell or by quantity of incoming or outgoing traffic, we have understood where the loss of field of our cell phone on New Year’s Eve. However, it must be specified that in the case of the most famous midnight of the year, it is not only the telephone cells that are tired, but the whole network in general.
Let’s look at it this way: the network, through its cells, does nothing other than manage the traffic generated by mobile phones, disposing of it gradually. But while in the case of a concert, only one cell is attacked, they leave the network “free” as a whole. Similarly, on New Year’s Eve (but also for example on public emergency situations) we witness a general communication overcrowding. In cases like this, it is not a specific problem, but a much more widespread one that involves the network on a large scale.
