this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
676 points (93.4% liked)

Greentext

4470 readers
1811 users here now

This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.

Be warned:

If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] echodot@feddit.uk 30 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

That reminds me of something.

Also on a bus. There was a group of girls on the bus and they were having a big loud argument about whether or not one of the group would receive a text from her partner or friend or whatever because "how would the text know where they were, as the bus is moving".

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 29 points 3 months ago (1 children)

A valid question. Luckily a lot of work has been done to address it.

[–] Omgpwnies@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

Pretty much the first thing that needed to be solved when moving from 1-way pagers to 2-way phones. Pagers could just get a broadcast analog signal and determine themselves if they were the intended recipient. 2-way needed more bandwidth and a dedicated communication channel to a specific device, so broadcast wasn't feasible. Thus, phones would send a registration signal that a tower would pick up, and that specific tower would handle all communication to that phone. If another tower got the registration signal, communication would switch to that tower.

Interestingly enough, there was a period (for a fairly long time) that if you were travelling too fast, you could either a) not be able to register on a network, or b) overwhelm the network with registrations - part of the reason why phones had to be turned off on airplanes