How does my tiny phone communicate with a cell tower so far away? How does it transmit my data to the cell tower?
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Cell towers operate in the UHF frequency band (300Mhz – 3Ghz) and are strictly line of sight. Thats why when you’re in a mountainous terrain service is bad, but in a building it’s still good.
To further extrapolate, cell towers utilize TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) technology so that everyone can use the same towers simultaneously. Think of a time when you were in a very public area where everyone is using their phone. You’d notice your service is very slow. That’s because bandwidth is very limited if the area hasn’t seen that much traffic. TDMA gives you a specific ‘slot’ of time to receive/send traffic. Typically in the milli/nanoseconds.
This differs from your WiFi connection as that operates in the 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz band. This network is yours and yours alone, however it can be interrupted by something like a microwave, that also works in the 2.4Ghz band, but just way higher power.
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