Eli5 why is cell coverage so bad at airports?
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Cell coverage is normally fine imo but the issue is bandwidth, or airtime caused by the large number of wireless clients.
With wireless networks such as cellular or WiFi in your home, in order to avoid traffic collisions a protocol called CSMA/CA is used. This stands for carrier sense multiple access collision avoidance.
Each device connected to the radio broadcaster has a specific time frame to broadcast on. The more devices which are connected, the less frequently your device gets the time to transmit or receive. You see this as slower speeds and higher latency.
There is also the potential issue of backhaul saturation. The backhaul is the fibre or copper cable which the cell tower connects back to the internet, there is only so much bandwidth available, usually between 1-10gbps for cities but sometimes less than 100mbps for rural areas. Even if the tower itself has the capacity to serve 2000 devices at once for example, the bandwidth just isn’t there so it’ll slow down to a crawl
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