Mobile networks are a truly great technology that allows us to have access to the internet almost anywhere, even in remote areas. Instead of having a cable plugged into your device, you can do everything wirelessly using radio waves. It has definitely changed our lives, for the better. However, when using mobile networks in our day-to-day lives.
We do not think about the technology behind it, we simply enable our mobile data and browse away. To understand the beauty of mobile networks, we have to dive deeper into it to see how it works.
The path of your mobile data
The path of your mobile data is really simple. The device establishes a connection with the nearest cell tower using radio waves and starts sending data. Cellular tower receives that data and sends it to the data center using underground cables.
Datacenter then transfers that data to whichever service you are trying to reach and waits for the response. Upon receiving a response from the service (for example website) it then sends back the data to the cellular tower via these same underground cables and the tower transmits that data back to you using radio waves.
How your device handles data
First, your device establishes a connection with one of the available cellular towers by emitting radio waves. To emit these radio waves, it needs to have a transmitter and antenna. The transmitter turns the data into radio waves that get transmitted through the antenna towards the nearest tower.
To receive data from cellular towers, the device has to have a receiver. Instead of sending data by creating radio waves, the receiver catches them coming from the cellular tower. Most of the time, the receiver and transmitter are combined into one device - a transceiver.
If you stay in the same place, your device and that cellular tower will keep communicating with each other. Tower will notify the device that it sees it and can clearly communicate with it and the device acknowledges that it should communicate with that tower instead of constantly looking for another one.
Once the tower notices it gets harder and harder to reach the device, it notifies the device that it should try looking for a new tower, so the device sends radio waves all around to see if any towers can respond. This process is really quick and usually seamless. That's why you do not even notice that you have switched to another tower.
If you have seen a cellular tower, you probably noticed that it has all these different devices on it. The tower might have the same-looking antennas or different ones, depending on the network generations it supports.
These antennas receive radio waves from different devices on different bands, depending on network generation used. Towers are usually connected to a data center via underground cables. That allows it to send and receive data to and from the data center. Connecting each tower with a cable could be challenging, especially in rural areas. Therefore, some towers have these big antennas that use microwaves instead of radio waves.
They pointed these antennas towards another tower that has a cable connection. When such towers receive a signal from a device, they forward the data via microwaves to another tower that can then send your data via cables to the data center.
How a data centers work
Once you send data, whether it’s from your house internet or remotely using a mobile network, it travels to your internet service provider (ISP) data center. The data center then has to forward that data to your destination. If you are in Europe and you wish to access something that is hosted in the USA, your data has to travel from your ISP data center, to possibly other bigger ISP such as Vodafone, which has an underwater cable between Europe and USA. To understand just how many underwater cables there are, you can check this website.
Smaller ISPs have to pay for the right to connect with bigger ISPs to use their infrastructure for sending and receiving data. Usually, such big companies have a national network and their underwater and underground cable connections so that data can be shared with other countries. It will charge accordingly the smaller ISPs for such privileges.
So whenever you send data, depending on the destination, it can go hundreds and even thousands of kilometers via underground and undersea cables to reach the destination. The fascinating thing about it is that it takes just a fraction of a second.
How different are network generations?
1G - It allowed making remote calls for the first time, however, because of its technology, the voice quality was poor and the speed reached a maximum of 2.4 Kbps.
2G - The second generation of mobile networks introduced SMS and internet browsing with speeds up to 50 Kbps.
3G - GPS, videos, voice calls. The third generation focused on improving data speeds and it offered 3Mbps speed. This has allowed the use of GPS, watching videos online, and making good quality phone calls. In a way, the third generation has allowed smartphones to be smart.
4G - Fourth generation increased data transfer speeds up to 100Mbps. That allowed viewing high-resolution content such as movies and having real-time video calls of high quality.
5G - The fifth generation is the latest generation that offers speeds of more than 10Gbps and really low latency. Such speeds and low latency pave a way for new technologies such as autonomous driving, smart cities, and much more.
