RE: Why is the laptop faster once on the train?

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RE: Why is the laptop faster once on the train? - 7/19/2011 8:01:48 PM

TreasureKY

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quote:

ORIGINAL: LadyConstanze

quote:

ORIGINAL: TreasureKY

I suspect none of the above. It likely has more to do with your cellular carrier, their tower locations, and radio wave propagation.

It slowed a couple of times on the journey there and back, but was literally creeping at the station. Not that it matters much but I was simply interested.

For the comedians - best keep the day job

You'd be surprised how much engineering goes into the attempt at complete coverage... indoors and in spite of other interference. You might not be surprised at the rate of failure.

Can you hear me now?

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RE: Why is the laptop faster once on the train? - 7/19/2011 8:09:27 PM

MastaYeti

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I'm pretty sure it's a quantum physics phase shift of the wave due to synergistic inertia, not anything logical like engineering...

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RE: Why is the laptop faster once on the train? - 7/19/2011 10:43:21 PM

shallowdeep

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Could have been either Hillwilliam's first serious explanation or TreasureKY's.

If a signal is poor, cellular systems will fall back to less efficient, but more robust, modulation and coding schemes to keep bit error rates at acceptable levels. The result is a drop in your effective data rates. In urban environments, signals can fade out due to shadowing and multipath interference pretty easily, even if you're within what might otherwise be reasonable range of the cellular base station.

However, if changing your location didn't help any and your phone showed a decent signal, it was quite possibly an issue with too many users, as Hillwilliam suggested. Even with ideal signal propagation, a base station only has a finite amount of spectrum to serve the area it's covering. Since all users in that area must share the same channel, things slow down if too many of them try to use it at once, as might easily happen in a crowded train station. To share a channel among users, a base station breaks the channel's resources into smaller chunks of frequency and time (or, equivalently, orthogonal codes) which can then be individually assigned to different users. As the number of users increases, the fraction of time, frequency, or code allocations on the channel that are granted to a given user will decrease, meaning reduced data rates.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Muttling
I'm not sure how vectors… play into… complex numbers, but it sounds cool.

That part's easy, at least: phasors. They're even quite applicable to the subject here.

Also, as wireless communications fall into the electrical engineering realm, I feel slightly obligated to point out that all calculations (even wholly nonsensical ones) with the imaginary unit should properly use a "j" for notation, not the confusing "i" employed by mathematicians. :)

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RE: Why is the laptop faster once on the train? - 7/20/2011 4:55:26 AM

LadyConstanze

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I was in and outside of Euston station (some tables and benches outside) as the train was delayed (a novelty, I tell ya

only happens about every other time) and inside the noise and the people were a bit much and I had about 30 minutes delay to kill, the weird thing was, I went on the train, found my seat, we hadn't left the station and the train was still in the covered bit (inside) and the connection picked up speed, the bars always showed I had pretty good coverage, so I think too many people using the signal is a pretty good idea.

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RE: Why is the laptop faster once on the train? - 7/20/2011 5:05:21 AM

PeonForHer

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I reckon you get a better signal on the train, Lady C. Yes, I think that's what it is.

I hope that helps.

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