> Through mechanisms which I do not really understand at all [Jesus Christ
> I feel old!], it is apparently somehow possible to access the Internet
> with such a device. (Presumably that's part of why it's so damned
> expensive - along with the obvious fact that it's extremely shiny.)
>
lol Mostly, its a marriage of of a TCP/IP type network thing, which maps
your phone to their network, using an ID, and a technology patented way
back in WWII, which the woman who came up with it had intended to be
used to circumvent German attempts to scramble torpedo guidance. The
military proved to be total morons (it was rejected and never used
during the war, or even after, for decades), but the original concept
was that you have something about the size of a pocket watch, on both
the torpedoes receiver, and the transmitter, then you would feed in a
bit of paper, at the same time, into both, which was similar to a punch
card. Each "hole" would cause the frequency to change, basically hopping
from one to the next, so the enemy couldn't pinpoint which one you where
using, and jam it. The same identical, save in electronic form,
technology is at the center of cell tower systems. Otherwise, you are
just using a lot of antennae, listening to all those frequencies, then
passing data back and forth, and into the main network, via the same
sort of system the internet itself uses to work out which set of servers
to pass your information through, to get from, say from Google to you,
and to send your requests to the right places.

If anything, since cell phones are mobile, their system can't do what
the internet has done, and undermine its flexibility, by hard coding
some routes into the network paths (which is why one server can go down
now, and you can't get there from here any more). Since the networks
work almost exactly the same though, in terms of digital packets, its
trivial to translate your "internet" address to a "cell" address, and 
pass the messages to the right locations.

Post a reply to this message