How do cell towers keep so many thousands of people connected at once? How does the message they send to my phone not interfere with the message sent at the same time to the person standing next to me?
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Modern cellular networks, as well as data only networks like Wifi, use a technique called “Time Division Multiple Access”, or TDMA to connect to lots of phones at the same time. Basically, the tower talks to each phone, one at time, and switches which phone it is talking to thousands of times per second. So your phone may get 1ms of communication time every 50ms. During that 1ms, your phone gets the last 50ms of audio data, which it plays back for your ear while waiting for its next turn to receive data. This means there is a slight delay in the sound of a phone call, and an added latency for data transmission compared to a wired network.
Each cell tower can only divide its time up between so many different clients, usually about 100 per cell. In order to have more than 100 clients, you need to have multiple cell base stations in the same area.
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