eli5 Why does cell phone service sometime get worse in areas with more people?

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We went to Disney World and my phone showed that I had full bars of 5 G and nothing would load. I’ve heard that it has something to do with the amount of people in the area but that doesn’t make sense to me. Can you please help me understand?

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Taking a different perspective, let’s say you’re in a big room with only one other person. You guys can talk to each other all day long with no issues.

Now let’s say you’re in the same size room (for argument sake let’s say it’s the size of half of basketball Court) and there are now 10 two person groups in the room. That’s OK, remember how big the room is… Everybody can still have a good conversation.

If you keep adding people to the room, sooner or later it’s going to be very difficult for anybody to concentrate on their conversation. And yes, in this example there are ways to alleviate that problem. With cell phone service, there’s a finite amount of communication media (the total bandwidth) and eventually your service will degrade.

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