Just to add a piece of data to support this:<p>> It turns out the phone signal inside the station can be better than the one above ground<p>I was surprised when I noticed I had 5G in the tunnel, ran a speed test and hit 641Mbps down!<p><a href="https://www.speedtest.net/result/i/6831252952" rel="nofollow">https://www.speedtest.net/result/i/6831252952</a>
That always hurts. I live in a particularly nice bit of London and there is virtually no mobile phone service other than voice and can only get 80 meg ADSL. Yet the mole people get better service. Grr.
One might even suspect that the particularly nice parts of London are full of NIMBYs who successfully petition against the eyesore of mobile masts being put up…<p>(Circumstantial evidence is that a particularly extra nice part of central London has no tube station, ostensibly to keep the riff-raff out, and is the only area with a proposed station on Crossrail 2 that voted against having a new station!)
> One might even suspect that the particularly nice parts of London are full of NIMBYs who successfully petition against the eyesore of mobile masts being put up…<p>I have a couple of the 4G-to-wifi bridges they used for the Free Wifi project during the Olympics kicking around somewhere, including the one they used for the promo photos. A friend of mine fitted them in the run-up to the Olympics, and the promo one had been sprayed in beautiful deep blue metallic paint with the logo stuck on.<p>He got given it to fit on a lamp post in a fairly posh London suburb, but the photographer couldn't come out so it was up there for about a week. When he came to remove it about half a dozen angry locals came up, complaining about the "microwave radiation was making them ill" and the "constant humming from it kept them awake at night", kind of thing, all the stuff they'd been ranting to the local fish-and-chips wrapper about.<p>"Oh, really? It's been affecting your health that badly?"<p>"Yes", they all replied, "we're getting a solicitor to take up our case, we're suing over it!"<p>"Oh," he said, opening the case he'd just taken down to reveal that it was completely empty. "Well, you're going to absolutely hate it when I put one up that's actually got the electronics inside then."
There's plenty of riff raff here. Like me :)
I have the opposite problem where I can only get HyperOptic. Not even OpenReach stuff. No problem with bandwidth but zero price competition, and 5G broadband isn’t viable either.<p>Going from £70/mo for gigabit to £65/mo for 500mb is insulting.
Wait, why can't you get Openreach ? Even if it was a new build by idiots who forgot to push the "Free fibre, yes please" button when breaking ground you should have DSL at least.
As a generalisation: OpenReach prioritise areas that have no fibre.<p>If Hyperoptic (or someone else like Community Fibre or The 4th Utility, etc) are in an area then OpenReach will put that area nearer to the bottom of their todo list.<p>It's better if they concentrate on putting fibre into areas that still have 7Mbps wet string DSL than competing in an area that already has one or more Gbps fibre options.<p>Even then, OpenReach tend to do FTTC first. Then it's case of what the last mile is formed of:<p>If it's via telephone poles then they get the fibre concentrators installed on the poles (which involves digging up the roads to get fibre to the poles) and then they're ready for the individual fibre runs to each property as and when they want to be connected.<p>You can see the differences in Google Streetview images in a residential road like: <a href="https://maps.app.goo.gl/RK8J8TXZUY6iF3pTA" rel="nofollow">https://maps.app.goo.gl/RK8J8TXZUY6iF3pTA</a> where the the June 2024 images show the fibre concentrators at the top of the pole, and then going back to the 2015 images or before where they aren't present.<p>If the last mile is underground then the fibre concentrators have to be installed in the service ducts (it's easier for them to deploy fibre alongside their existing copper pairs) and the last 5-50 yards to the actual premises is an absolute lottery, especially as many house redevelopments bury existing underground cables under concrete and other structures and twist/kink things in a way that copper is fine to deal with but there's little chance you can run anything else through whatever conduit is there, let alone something without corners too tight for fibre.<p>Compare the above overhead wiring fun with a street such as: <a href="https://maps.app.goo.gl/oDchjxtaoxPD5Pe86" rel="nofollow">https://maps.app.goo.gl/oDchjxtaoxPD5Pe86</a> where there are no telephone poles.
Do they seriously still do FTTC? In Australia we had an idiot government that stopped our national-wide open access network doing fibre to the premises (i.e. FTTH) and changed to FTTC to “save costs”. After it actually being more expensive (our copper was decades old in most areas and had been under maintained by the old privatised monopoly - and it turns out having to send techs out to fault fix all the time really adds up), they had to abandon the program and now have to go back and are gradually re-doing it with full fibre, costing more money all over again.<p>It was actually a worst case scenario, because FTTC often actually gives you a sub-optimal point to build out full fibre from, because you need way more cabinets to get decent copper speeds than you need optical splitters if you’re going to a passive optical network, so just building a decently optimised PON network is much cheaper than doing FTTC and then transferring to full fibre.
Nobody serves the postcode any more.
Reading this hurts. I'm on £26 a month for a gigabit connection in Z4.
Sigh. Urban expectations. Come live in the sticks where I do and pay £35/m for about 15Mb. Actually had to go Starlink to be able to work from home properly. Swish fibre came round a few years ago and dug up all our roads and put fibre to all the phone poles but then vanished and nothing has happened since.
Urgh hyperoptic is dog shit as well. CGNAT or pay extra on top of already insulting prices.
> Urgh hyperoptic is dog shit as well<p>Sounds like they haven't changed !<p>I recall helping out a friend to review a Hyperoptic proposal for their development.<p>Hyperoptic's idea of "optic" was fibre to a switch in the basement and then unshielded CAT5e to the users premises.<p>If that wasn't bad enough, even to the untrained eye, you did not need a measuring tape to see they would have exceeded the CAT length limit by quite some margin for many of the users.<p>And that's before their claims of owning the external fibre when in reality they were just contracting an ethernet service from BT.<p>So yeah, I would not touch Hyperoptic with a bargepole. I suspect the other altnets are no better .... "sell, build, disappear off to the sunset" was the impression I got.<p>Reading some of the reviews on the internet about post-sales support I'm not surprised in the slightest that users often struggle to get support once the salesdroid has long departed their doorstep.
I feel like I'm going crazy. Hyperoptic is fine. I pay 40 quid for gigabit, and it's stable and fast.
I almost moved into a nice warehouse space in farringdon once only to discover it only got 12 meg service somehow. I didn't even know you could get less than 80meg now.
I moved into a commercial warehouse/workshop space in the center of Chicago in 2021 and was asked to install wired Internet for the building. The workshop that made up the other half of our building had Comcast. All the buildings across the street had Comcast.<p>Called Comcast. Sent a team out. Told me it would be $69,000 installation then minimum $800/month for gigabit. Complained up the chain. They sent another team out and apologized and told me the first team made a mistake on the price. The install would actually be $71,000.<p>AT&T was the only other wired option. Best they could offer was 1.5Mbps.<p>Ended up with a T-Mobile 5G router that gave us a solid 800Mbps down.
Is it practical to pay BT or HyperOptic to run fibre to you? If enough households commit to a contract they’ll sometimes do it for free.
Like many of London's woes, that's because of planning, councils have to approve infrastructure and block it: <a href="https://www.londoncentric.media/p/why-exactly-is-londons-phone-signal" rel="nofollow">https://www.londoncentric.media/p/why-exactly-is-londons-pho...</a><p>I'd say it's developing-world tier, but a lot of the developing world has really good 5G signal these days.
There are also some absolute morons out there. Couple of local things around me...<p>First I went to one of the local town planning meetings in my area when they were rolling out FTTC. This one was due to a rather old person objecting to the placement of a streetside box which was not even outside her property and no one who it would have affected could see it or cared about it. I raised my objections about her being a NIMBY old fart and was asked to leave. She single-handedly blocked it for 5 years due to council connections. She dropped dead. Stuck on 20 meg ADSL until that happened.<p>Second, they built a 5g mast put didn't put any equipment in it and left it 3 months. Several local threads on Facebook from the tweakers about how it was causing all sorts of completely unrelated problems from tinnitus to covid to mind control. Then someone burned it. There is still no equipment in the cabinet or mast today, nearly 4 years on. No one got 5g.
<i>Second, they built a 5g mast put didn't put any equipment in it and left it 3 months. Several local threads on Facebook from the tweakers about how it was causing all sorts of completely unrelated problems from tinnitus to covid to mind control. Then someone burned it. There is still no equipment in the cabinet or mast today, nearly 4 years on. No one got 5g.</i><p>Reminds me of this infamous decade-old story:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20161010203002/http://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/11099-massive-revelation-in-iburst-tower-battle.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20161010203002/http://mybroadban...</a>
This is standard advice among ham radio operators. If you're putting up a tower, put it up, mount the antennas, run the feedlines, but resist the temptation to operate for a while. Or use it for receive-only.<p>Log your activity, or lack thereof, meticulously. Perhaps a critical part was back-ordered, or more expensive than expected, and note in the log how it still hasn't arrived so you still aren't able to operate. If complaints come in, get them to be maximally public about it, ideally in a town meeting or something, then whip out your logbook and coup-fourré. Let the wackos show themselves to be wackos, then quietly start operating some time later.
I wonder what that group of people would have made of <a href="https://youtu.be/zy_ctHNLan8" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/zy_ctHNLan8</a><p>(Chaotic lawfully :D)
PvP systems are absolutely exhausting. What a waste of energy
This happens a million times all over the country by YouTube and social media addicted morons. Who go on to complain about how "nothing ever gets done in this country" and they want the "good old days" back.<p>Except in the good old days things just got done when there was demand for them and NIMBYs were told to fuck off.
<i>I'd say it's developing-world tier, but a lot of the developing world has really good 5G signal these days.</i><p>They also have a much bigger population using exclusively mobiles rather than landlines, since their infrastructure developed when the former was already available, and it's cheaper to just put up a few towers than run one landline to each subscriber.
During Covid people were attacking engineering laying fibre because it was “5g”, and facebook had told them 5g caused Covid.
tl;dr people reject installing ugly masts in densely urbanised neighbourhoods, meaning there often isn't enough capacity for everyone to get fast 5G.
Great - what does customers do with 640 Mbps downstream in the metro then? :-D :-D
Pretty neat but as someone who commutes every day on the New York subway I hope it’s never “cracked” here. Phone usage without headphones is already annoying enough and I greatly appreciate the various people trying to take calls eventually lose service.
It’s a tough choice, is it worse to hear their phone calls, or hear 2 seconds of every bit of TikTok/Instagram feed trash. Either way, no cellular access seems a plus.
Somehow even though there's great cell coverage in Warsaw metro people aren't being obnoxious with it.
Who still calls anyway? Literally all my friends exclusively message now (on WhatsApp).<p>It would be really annoying if I were out of touch for the whole duration of subway trips. But in my city it works great. Here the 3 main providers pooled together and shared the installation.
> Literally all my friends exclusively message now (on WhatsApp).<p>An annoyingly large number of them send audio messages. It’s worse for everyone involved.
One or two people per carriage/bus.
The worst is not calls, it is the thousands of zombies hooked up on tiktok 24/7, of course with headphones, so completely unaware and indifferent to their environment, who block tunnels, escalators, turnstiles, etc.
This behaviour is so bad on London (above ground) trains, if they ever do 'crack it' and roll out mobile signal to the Underground, those tiny carriages will be unbearable.
There already is signal on many underground lines, and it’s pretty rare that people are playing things out loud in my experience?
London, increasingly common. I’d say a third of the time when I take the tube. Combine that with people making loud calls, 100% of the time. But I find people imposing their music or tiktok videos more obnoxious than a builder discussing his next job a bit loudly.
The tube is ~80db (depending on line) so you're not going to hear it anyway.<p>but, if I was mayor, I would be getting the transport police to have a word with phones on speakers.
A third of the time?<p>Sorry, nonsense. I use the tube several times a day and it's a real rarity.<p>I do worry about the tube becoming a cacophony of phone calls, but really? Everyone message now anyway so I reckon that'll be a rarity too.
I think it will depend on your route and the time of your commute. I see fairly distinct behaviour at different times on the tube & Elizabeth Line: come in or leave late and it's full of people who are much less considerate, go in with the majority and there's a bit more social pressure against being inconsiderate.
I also never see this behaviour, but I pretty much only use the tube for commuting at peak times. I think commuters are generally better behaved. The sheer density of people means that anti social behaviour will get angrily shut down very quickly.
It may also be highly dependent on which direction you travel. When you travel east from the city, you get totally different demographics than when you travel west.
My daily train to/from London Bridge to West Croydon is borderline unbearable.
It's because phones speakers aren't loud enough to be audible over the sound of the tube itself!<p>It is noticeable on buses and overground when people play things out load, but to be honest quite rare in the grand scheme of things.
That's true. I made several complaints about that to TFL before capitulating and just settling for noise-cancelling headphones.<p>Never been happier.<p>The clincher was noticing that the drivers themselves had access to ear defenders ... TFL said that that's because they're down there for extended periods of time. Sounds reasonable but I'm not buying that as a way out of not fixing the issue and exposing my ears to the worst bits of the tube.<p>Also has the ancillary benefits of blocking out those rare times (for me) when people do have their phone on speaker or are having a chat I'm uninterested in.
Welcome to the UK where citizens are so apathetic they don't care about aging infrastructure or government money being siphoned away.
There's literally already signal on half the Underground, has been for six months to a year, and as someone who gets the tube twice a day I've literally never seen someone do voice call. Literally ever.
Bad News! They already ruined that one.<p><a href="https://www.boldyn.com/us/news/at-t-and-boldyn-networks-bring-cellular-service-to-the-mtas-joralemon-street-tunnel" rel="nofollow">https://www.boldyn.com/us/news/at-t-and-boldyn-networks-brin...</a>
What is the thing with people using phones without headphones? And making calls on public transport? When did that become a thing? It’s the most obnoxious selfish behaviour and it shocks me every time.<p>It’s not just Gen Z either, I’ve seen a few boomers do it and even a couple of millennials.
Not to excuse other people's behavior but buying a decent pair of noise canceling headphones or earbuds will make putting up with it a whole lot easier. You don't even have to listen to anything, or you can put rain noises and thunderstorms. It's as much better soundscape than public transport.
That also creates a problem that people then can not hear important announcements or be aware of dangers (such as knife wielding attackers, as happened on an LNER train just late last year)
A deaf person wouldn't be able to either. We need better non audible ways of signalling.
You can still hear those things, just not obnoxiously loudly. NC works best against static sounds. Speech still makes it through. Just not as loud.<p>If you're in a busy car enough people will hear it to be aware, and if you're on your own you will hear the announcement clearly.<p>Besides it's really a one in 10 million chance you'll get stabbed on the metro, not worth worrying about. The chance of getting hit by a car in traffic is much higher. That feeling of always being in some kind of danger seems to be very American, I never really see that in people here in Europe. I think it's the sensationalism in the press there, every little incident is blown up to massive "BREAKING NEWS!" proportions.
Don't lecture me in a condescending manner. I'm British, I've taken the train all my life, and for years have worn NC headphones to counter the incessant announcements and anti social behaviour. I also have to my play my own music to drown it out<p>Also: generalising about Europeans is quite ignorant. As is ignoring recent data and recent risks and just citing long term data to insinuate people are being hysterical
Noise cancelling headphones on NYC public transit is insanity.
Why is your need for silence more important than other people's need to communicate?
Neither of those things are needs, it’s just wants and preferring your own wants over others is completely normal.<p>Imagine trying to live your life where other people’s desires by default overrode you own.
Because silence is a common good, like clean air. It's everyone's. When people fill it with their noise they effectively privatize it for the duration. When they shout on speakerphone or play their music or blare sound from their apps it's especially selfish.
<i>Imagine trying to live your life where other people’s desires by default overrode you own.</i><p>Unfortunately that happens a lot; it's called the government.
It's actually against byelaws to play music or other loud sounds on transport in London and they can prosecute you if they so wished...<p>It's about acknowledging it's a shared resource and respecting the space. No loud noises, no littering, no being drunk etc<p>These days people act like they're the only ones travelling
Etiquette. Some are raised with it.
Simply being polite. Understanding there are other people in the world you inhabit. Things like that.
They can use headphones. The problem is listening to someone scroll through tiktok with volume on max.
Their silence disrupts no one, but one call or loud song disrupts 20-40 people their peace.<p>Don't be a douche.
You’re be a bit contrarian there and I’m quite sure you actually believe it’s far more nuanced than that
You do understand that one of those “needs”affects others around you, and one of them leaves them in peace, right?
Also I’m sure parent wasn’t referring to emergency calls
I had assumed the delay was technical but it turns out it was mostly about finding a business model that worked for everyone. It is good they finally settled on a shared infrastructure approach so they do not have to crowd the tunnels with extra equipment.
I'm old enough to remember the first attempt at 'mobile underground'. Maybe I've forgotten the name but it was something like BT Phone Zone, though google returns zero relevant results, so perhaps it was called something else. In lieu of public call boxes, BT trialled a base station that was installed in some tube stations (almost certainly Oxford St and Tottenham Court Rd), and with the correct 'wireless handset' as long as you were within 10 feet of it, or thereabouts, you could make a call. I'm sure I remember a semi-circle painted on the ground that if you stood in, you were in range.
You might be thinking of Rabbit:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_%28telecommunications%29" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_%28telecommunications%2...</a>
Whilst I have seen the Rabbit fittings others have mentioned I do remember mention of a "zone phone" and suspect we're recalling the same thing...
Was it a Rabbit Telepoint, perchance?<p><a href="https://www.engagingwithcommunications.com/publications/THG_Papers/Telepoint/telepoint.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.engagingwithcommunications.com/publications/THG_...</a>
I use the underground frequently. It doesn't really feel like half of it is covered. Where it is available, it works amazingly. I might have been using the other half by sheer luck.
I find it works pretty well, at least that I’m consistently surprised I have any signal at all. Sometimes I need to disable private relay to get it to work with all the switchovers. There’s also frequent swapping between the 5G signal and the Wi-Fi that comes auto-enabled on my phone by my carrier who provides a client certificate entitling me to it.<p>I’m not sure about the privacy implications of this whole setup. It’s basically turned the underground into a surveillance dragnet that can hoover up all sorts of interesting metadata… hostnames, hardware identifiers, traveling patterns, DNS queries, SNI requests… and an untold amount of unencrypted communications across weird protocols and devices..
I wonder if they considered using the existing metal tracks as antennae, or even <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_line_communication" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_line_communication</a> to feed base stations in the trains themselves.<p><i>So the ESN in the tunnels runs at 400 MHz, far lower than the 700 to 3,600 MHz range usually used by smartphones.</i><p>It's worth noting that 450MHz was listed as one of the GSM bands, but apparently was never used: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_bands#GSM-450" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_bands#GSM-450</a>
> It's worth noting that 450MHz was listed as one of the GSM bands, but apparently was never used<p>It's specified for 4G/LTE (Band 31, 72 & 73) and 5G (Band n31 & n72) as well! The bandwidth is pretty low though at just 5 MHz, but it's used for special purpose stuff like electricity meters. I'm not aware of any consumer devices that use this frequency.
Weird because very few phones have that band. Requires much larger antennas. Twice as long as for 800Mhz.<p>Edit: ah I see why, this is exclusively about the Emergency Services network, not for regular phones.<p>In that sense it seems a bit similar to GSM-R used by the railways here.
I think that part of the article is wrong. The old radio system apparently uses ~400 MHz, but ESN seems to use the same/similar bands as mobile services (700 MHz and above).
This is the new system for emergency communications? TfL just finished up an upgrade on that in 2021. That upgrade was built by Thales.[1] That system is purely for operational use, and is not cell phone compatible. It's compatible with the gear cops and fire brigades use. Is it being replaced?<p>As late as 2018, the classic century-old system, with two bare wires on insulators on the tunnel walls, was still maintained.[2] Clipping a telephone handset to the two wires would connect to a dispatcher, and the wires were placed so that reaching out of the driver's cab to do this was possible. In addition, squeezing the wires together by hand would trip a relay and cut traction power. Is that still operational? The 2011 replacement was ISDN.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/news-centre/press-releases/thales-performs-critical-refresh-london-undergrounds-communications" rel="nofollow">https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/news-centre/press-releases/th...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.railengineer.co.uk/communications-on-the-central-line/" rel="nofollow">https://www.railengineer.co.uk/communications-on-the-central...</a>
Definitely not. Try it in Tokyo, every single line, every single station has high speed coverage. I can’t recall signal ever dropping out for me.
It makes me sick to see London bragging about this. This is last century technology, and other cities managed to retrofit this just fine, including of course using leaky cable in the tunnels.<p>That it took 20-30 years longer than everyone else is through absolute incompetence and mismanagement. It would have been in place at least 10 years ago if they hadn't screwed up the RFP that Huawei won.<p>And it's not even shared infra! Vodafone is WAY behind the other networks.<p>I have worked with these things. There's no valid excuse for being 20-30 years behind on this.<p>And it's still not landed! By the time it finally gets to all stations I wouldn't be surprised if it's 40-50 years behind everyone else.
I'm having a really hard reading this. Not only are the paragraphs are so short, they each feel like part of a uncompleted thought.<p>The content doesn't feel AI generated, but maybe it is? I read somewhere that short paragraphs is an AI signature!?
One of the frustrating things about international roaming in the UK is typically your plan does not include coverage on this neutral network on the underground
I was thinking it could be a radio band issue?<p>I had a fun situation when I had friends visiting me in Japan for a road trip. One friend's US-model Android phone didn't support the specific low bands used for sparse coverage in rural Japan, but the repeaters inside of the tunnels were all on standard 2100 MHz, so whenever we drove through a tunnel he rushed to his phone to get some messages through. Kind of the opposite to what you usually experience with loss of signal in tunnels :)
Source? As someone that comes back to London every month, I’ve been able to roam the same as anywhere else in the UK. I’d be shocked if this were true.
Did the UK stop people from just picking up a cheap SIM at the Airport? I always like a local number when traveling. Anyway, Indian Roaming plans are so cheap these days that it's much easier and cheaper to just subscribe to them as part of the plan. These days, I don’t even need to add/activate it or anything, the providers turn it ON when I start my phone outside India and turn it off when I re-activate back in India.
The main problem if you're roaming is that you're considered a lower-priority customer, and since the network is often saturated already, you don't get any bandwidth.
I don't think that's correct.<p>With the old WiFi networks (Virgin, Vodafone WiFi, etc.), yes.<p>With the new 4G+5G coverage, you can access that the same as you access above ground coverage.
As a resident with a phone problem I miss the underground not having any signal. Other people using TikTok doesn’t bother me so much because it’s relatively rare. My own tendencies with screen time bother me more. No internet actually forced me to read books more and I miss that.<p>But this is a lot better for tourists who need the internet to navigate underground. So I’m pleased for them.
Interesting! I know Sweden was not first, but Stockholm has had 3g coverage in the subway since 2005 and 4g since 2016.
In Japan, mobile works everywhere.<p>Not exactly sure how they do it, but you could use phones on trains, last century.
> In Japan, mobile works everywhere<p>Yes Japan has the best mobile wireless coverage bar none, but not everywhere.<p>Based on my experiences there's significant blind spot of mobile wireless coverage along the way from Fukuoka station to Iizuka.<p>Thanks to the OP excellent article.
From looking at the WiFi ssid’s broadcast at the New York subway stations, I believe Boldyn also does the phone coverage here too
They didn't. In the Bakerloo line there is no coverage save for wifi on stations, not on tracks.
Anyone who lives in London knows that phone coverage on the Tube is anything but "cracked".
The Paris metro figured this out perfectly way back in 2021 - full bars, 5G.
Are the dual redundant leaky feeders configured to act as a MIMO array?
How London enabled TikTok addicts to annoy other passengers
>There’s another distance limit at work here, and that is the speed of light. It takes milliseconds for the signal in your phone to reach the hotel above ground and be handed over to the mobile network. But if it takes too long to get from phone to hotel, then your phone call s..a.rt..s..t o. br..e..ak up. As it happens, that distance is about 12km, so Boldyn needs nine hotels around London to cover the whole of the Underground<p>I find that interesting. Another fascinating rabbit hole the article has sent me down is that there is an unused station called north end. I've been down that stretch before and i had no idea. Does anyone know if passengers can see it?
> What happens if a train has to stop in the middle of the tunnel, and you phone for help? [...] the system has been deliberately configured to transmit the location of the nearest tube station, where access can be arranged. That’s why sometimes you might check your smartphone map, and it will display the “wrong” location, because that’s the best one for a 999 call to use.<p>This doesn't seem correct - cell towers don't just transmit a location that phones then pickup and use? Unless this is some emergency specific feature I'm not aware of?
> This doesn't seem correct - cell towers don't just transmit a location that phones then pickup and use?<p>I think it works like this: Towers transmit location. If the phone has no other source of location data, it'll fall back to "probably within radio range of this only tower I can hear"
> There’s another distance limit at work here, and that is the speed of light. It takes milliseconds for the signal in your phone to reach the hotel above ground and be handed over to the mobile network.<p>It takes roughly 100us for light to travel 30km – Can you explain how the speed of light is relevant here?
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