Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe the Android guy with pocketnow.com recently michael fisher asked a question why is his tethered internet connection so much more fragile than well just on his cell phone alone it's an interesting question but a little bit of an interesting answer let's go take a look so here's our scenario you're riding a train got your cell phone in your pocket and you're tethering turned on you've got your tablet sitting on your lap and you're reading the news or surfing your favorite website which we all know is pocketnow.com so you notice that something happens and your articles aren't coming up and it's a pain in the neck because you just dropped connection and it says that it can't load the page well that's not our fault that's not your phone's fault but it kind of is so first let's talk about cellular phones and how they work and I know this is going to be like remedial cellular telephony for most of us but hang out with me because it applies so the way a cell phone works is imagine circles drawn on a map those circles are essentially the radius or the diameter or the area man I need to go back to geometry where a cell phone signal can reach with the point in the middle being the cell phone tower itself fair enough right well you start putting more cells on the map and you start getting more circles on the map and hopefully those circles overlap because if they don't you have holes you have gaps in your coverage where you honestly you drop calls to pain in the neck we've we've been there we've done that we don't have that much of a problem anymore we've got pretty much blanketed coverage except for weird areas you know where topography kind of dictates that the signals skip over the top of it or maybe they don't reach the top of it or it's a building and they bounce all around it who knows but that notwithstanding that's what cells are that's in fact why we call themselves or just little round circles on a map now what happens is when you turn on your phone you connect to the sell that you're closest to not necessarily you connect to the cell that has the strongest signal which may not be the one that you're closest to ironically enough so that's a myth we just dispelled right there one of the nice things about cell phones is their mobile I know you guys all know that but did you ever wonder how that works because if you're connected to your closest cell tower at home and then you hop in your car to go to work hop on your bike get on a bus right a train whatever you're still not connected to that cell at your house you just can't go that far it's not going to happen so what happens how does it work well ironically it's not like you think so as you start leaving your cellular area moving around in it that one cell that you're connected to the signal gets weaker and weaker and weaker the further you get away from it well as you're doing that the signals from other cells become stronger and stronger now you might be getting closer to two or three cells that are stronger than the one that you connected to originally and you think that as soon as one signal becomes stronger than the one that you're connected to now you're going to hand off most of the times that's not the case instead what happens is your cell phone will stay connected to the tower that you were originally connected to as long as it can until that signal drops so poor that it can't maintain a connection anymore it's going to stay connected there even if there are two or three or even four or five cells that have a stronger signal now why does it do that there are lots of reasons but simply put it doesn't know if you're going to move back to that original cell that's one reason because if it if it just hand it off willy-nilly like that you'd be bounced back and forth between cells very very quickly then then you've got load balancing and whatnot of the cells that are impacted you also have that negotiation there's overhead they're essentially the the cells which have computers in them have to calculate how to hand off your information to that next one and there's a process involved there the more times that happens the more processing power it takes the more electricity it takes the slower it is for everybody else yada yada yada so essentially those two reasons you're going to stay connected to that weak signal until it's so weak that it can't handle you anymore here's a downside to that first of all your signal strength drops so your data speeds drop really wasn't a big deal with you know voice phones because voices voice as long as your voice quality is okay you're okay because a voice conversation is a voice conversation and no big deal data on the other hand data varies significantly your speed is going to fluctuate and it's going to go down the further you are away from that cell so we might want to update our cell phone towers carriers to handle that we'll come back to that in a minute the second reason is battery life you've got a battery inside there okay and just nestled right inside your phone there's a cell phone antenna too well the further away you are from that tower the stronger the signal is that you have to send out which takes more power so that you can maintain that connection not of course eat your battery faster so every once in a while if you find yourself in that situation turn your phone off or go into airplane mode and come back up that will help quite a bit so now we know how cell signals handoff from one cell to another and in normal activity that's you know not a problem when we start getting on to faster and faster modes of transit whether that's a vehicle and of course you're a passenger when you're using your phone in your car right you're not driving and using your phone sure hope not there's your PSA for the day PSAs public safety announcement so what about when you're on a train or a bus or you know some other form of mass transit that goes kind of fast well here's something interesting as you're moving away from one cell and approaching another cell again that handoff doesn't happen until the original cell is so weak that it just doesn't work anymore by that point you may already be past the the next greatest powerful cell that doesn't make much sense because you're already past it you should be looking to the next one and kind of you know leapfrog from one skip one to the next one and possibly well you can't do that right now so you're constantly being shuffled from one cell to another cell that's already behind you in a lot of cases now here's the funny thing we have the technology now that we could tell the cell phone tower here's who I am and here's where I'm going and here's my speed and that cell tower has the intelligence potentially to know he's on the train therefore I want to make sure that I'm passing him off to these cells in this sequence as this goes on and it would help boost the signal for everybody now we're not doing that right now why because it's going to require new protocols both in the cellular radios and new bits new new processes inside the cells themselves it's not being done it really should be but you know what are you going to do so in the meantime that's what we have that's okay though because cell phones have this tolerance built into them they know they're a cell phone and they know that they should expect this kind of behavior so they minimize that impact on us so it's more transparent we don't see it that's where the fragility comes in okay so back to our cell phone everything works great here but as soon as you come over here even though it's the same internet connection things break so why is that first reason you're adding another layer of complexity you've got Wi-Fi to deal with now you can have lots of other people on the train or on the bus or you know in the carpool lane next to you then I'll have their Wi-Fi bubbles on that are interfering with you so now you've got Wi-Fi interference to consider we're just going to skip past that because there's really nothing you can do about that changing channels and whatnot but phones really don't have that power that capability included in them so what are you going to do the next thing that we have of course is this doesn't know you're on cellular it does have those tolerances it doesn't make that experience transparent to you like the cellular phone does kind of make sense right this doesn't know if I'm connected to my cell phone by tethering or if I'm connected to my Wi-Fi point here in my house or if we're connected to say a mesh network at the college campus or at my at my work compound it doesn't know they're very different types of networks but this treats them all the same and there's a relatively low level of Tolerance there so when a problem happens you're more apps to see it here than you are when you're on your native device lastly and this might be a little bit too obvious once I say it if you're using this as your device that you're tethered to where do you keep it when you're using this when you're surfing the web it's out here like this guess what that antenna it's got free rein you've got a stronger signal right here when you're surfing the web on your phone now I've got it in my holster or in my pocket or in my bag or in my briefcase and you know what I just lost a whole bunch of signal strength by putting it way down there I don't see that though because I'm surfing the web up here on my tablet so if I were to take my phone have it in my hand and just kind of keep it out here like this and surf like this I'd look really silly but I'd probably have a better experience keep that in mind if you've got fragile tethering experiences pull out your cell phone set it down on the tray next to you or the seat next you just don't go off and leave it please that's sad then we have to do a video on what to do if your wife's phone gets stolen you know all kinds of fun stuff like that which we did by the way fun story if you haven't seen it make sure you go and do android get weekly but three reasons why your tablet connection or your laptop connection is more fragile when you're tethering then your cellphone connection in the same location I hope you found it educational I hope you learned something from it and I hope it makes your tethering experiences a little bit better of course those are just a few of my observations and a few of the tips that I was able to put other I want to hear some of your tips so please if you've got any ideas any extra technical information you'd like to add some some stories that you have of where tethering was problematic and what you did to fix it head over to pocketnow.com leave an article or leave a comment on this article so that we can all participate there in one place so we've got a little bit of a problem where a lot of us talk on the YouTube comments and a lot of us talked on the pocket now comments and they're separate so I'm going to put a link right down there if you're on the YouTube page you'll know where I'm talking about if you're on pocket now you're already there don't worry about it but right down there I'll have a link to this article so you can put all of your comments there and please do that's it do you like it if so I want to know again leave me a comment for pocket now and the android guy weekly I'm Joe Levi you