Does cellular data physically exist somewhere once it’s transmitted or received? How does that process work?

Question

Additionally, if you’re up for it, what are the costs involved for the phone companies?

Unfortunately, googling this only turned up a lot of results about how consumers can use less data to save money.

In: Technology

Answer 1

Not all data transmitted is stored. For instance anything sent within an app would only be stored if the app developer chooses to do so on their servers.

Phone companies store a copy of each text message digitally with a bunch of metadata like time stamps and locations of cell towers. They host that data typically on their servers. Physical copies are usually just printouts of that same data.