Imagine you want to send a toy to your friend who lives super far away, like on the other side of the world. Instead of walking or driving it there, which would take forever, you put the toy in a super-fast rocket that zooms through the sky!
A text message is like that toy, but instead of a rocket, it travels through wires, air, and even space using something called the internet. When you send a text, your phone breaks it into tiny pieces, like puzzle bits. These bits zip through cables under the ground, bounce to satellites in the sky, or hop between towers that talk to each other with invisible signals. It’s like a super-speedy relay race!
The pieces go really fast—almost as fast as light—and when they get to your friend’s phone, they get put back together into your message. All this happens in just a few seconds because the internet is like a giant, magical road that connects everyone’s phones everywhere!
Remember speed of light? At the speed of light, you could circle the globe seven and a half times in a second. What happens is that the message travels from your phone to the cellular tower at speed of light. It is then routed from the tower to the service provider’s backhaul (or more recently, to the Internet).
In these networks, the message gets passed at near the speed of light between a number of switches towards the intended destination. It eventually arrives in the network of the receiving handset’s service provider. Then the service provider stores the message until the receiving handset pages a cellular tower, asking for arriving messages.
Until the last part, the message has taken maybe only half a second to travel; the last part is where you might end up at minutes if the receiving handset doesn’t page for messages.
Its pretty simple, text is converted to 1s and 0s or on and off. A set of 8 bits/on offs makes 255 different combinations.
A bunch of people stand on hills with binoculars and someone turns lights on/off and writes them down and then re sends it to the next person.
Then its transcribed back to letters.
In fact its not much different except its over strands of glass over long distances. And its on/off millions of times a second instead of a human reading a lamp on and off.
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Imagine you want to send a toy to your friend who lives super far away, like on the other side of the world. Instead of walking or driving it there, which would take forever, you put the toy in a super-fast rocket that zooms through the sky!
A text message is like that toy, but instead of a rocket, it travels through wires, air, and even space using something called the internet. When you send a text, your phone breaks it into tiny pieces, like puzzle bits. These bits zip through cables under the ground, bounce to satellites in the sky, or hop between towers that talk to each other with invisible signals. It’s like a super-speedy relay race!
The pieces go really fast—almost as fast as light—and when they get to your friend’s phone, they get put back together into your message. All this happens in just a few seconds because the internet is like a giant, magical road that connects everyone’s phones everywhere!
EM waves, cell towers, satellites and underwater cables. EM waves travel extremely fast, because in a vacuum, they go at the speed of light.
It takes an entire minute because these systems are obsolete, poorly standardised and involve a thousand middlemen, each of whom wants their cut.
Internet messaging will do the job in around 100ms one way.
Remember speed of light? At the speed of light, you could circle the globe seven and a half times in a second. What happens is that the message travels from your phone to the cellular tower at speed of light. It is then routed from the tower to the service provider’s backhaul (or more recently, to the Internet).
In these networks, the message gets passed at near the speed of light between a number of switches towards the intended destination. It eventually arrives in the network of the receiving handset’s service provider. Then the service provider stores the message until the receiving handset pages a cellular tower, asking for arriving messages.
Until the last part, the message has taken maybe only half a second to travel; the last part is where you might end up at minutes if the receiving handset doesn’t page for messages.
Its pretty simple, text is converted to 1s and 0s or on and off. A set of 8 bits/on offs makes 255 different combinations.
A bunch of people stand on hills with binoculars and someone turns lights on/off and writes them down and then re sends it to the next person.
Then its transcribed back to letters.
In fact its not much different except its over strands of glass over long distances. And its on/off millions of times a second instead of a human reading a lamp on and off.