Maybe an ignorant question, but i sat up thinking about it last night.
In: Technology
Cell phones use radio waves to communicate with the nearest cell tower which is connected by cables to the cell tower the person you are calling is nearest.
The interesting part is that there aren’t enough radio frequencies for this to work, so we have to use math to encode as much information as possible in the smallest portion of the radio spectrum. There have been 5 generations of technology to do this which you might be familiar with the last three (3G, 4G, 5G). Each have required more powerful compute power in both the phone and the tower, although 5G also required different radio frequencies so it was more hardware than software based relative to the previous generations.
Sound waves from your vocal cords (your voice) move through the air and are picked up by the phone’s microphone, a receptor for these audio waves. Phone converts this to a data signal, and then your cell phone sends that signal to the nearest cell tower, and on and on through the phone infrastructure, until it is sent to the other person’s phone, which then decodes that data signal into a sound recording and plays that as sound waves exiting the speaker and the person hears what you said, more or less how you said it, including your voice itself, your accent, your tone, etc. it’s not perfect but it’s damn near!
This capture, signal conversion, transmission, signal conversion again, and replication are very fast. There is very little lag, but the lag is more and more the further distance.
Important to mention that even though we use cell towers now, the back end long range transmission happens in massive cables. So if you call someone in France from USA, your voice data is going through an undersea cable for most of the journey.
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