How Does a Cell Tower Identify and Differentiate Between Messages from Different Phones?

Question

How does it happen that a cell tower knows who sent which message and simultaneously sends and receives multiple messages?

Answer 1

Every cell has a unique code that distinguishes each message sent from a forth against the phone it was transmitted from. In order to differentiate and coordinate the multipoint a protocol is utilized where messages are sent at different times or frequencies or locations or different codes. This can be compared to the situation when students in a classroom raise their hands and wait for the teacher to ask them to speak — only one student speaks at a time, which guarantees there is no overlap of messages.

Comments

Very good content, answered all my questions except one. How does the tower know which tower to send the info to. Maybe the other phone is 10 m away, and the signal output should happen from the same tower. Or maybe it should send it to a tower in a different country. How does it know which tower to send to?

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Thats so awesome

Unlike other vids/books u answered what we really are asking such as how do they know its me or differentiate between us

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This answered everything but one question I was wondering - how does Tower A know which tower to route my call or text to? How does it know where my friend is in the world and, from there, choose the most appropriate Tower B?

Thanks!

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very well explained. no other content talks about how towers differentiate signal. thanks

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How does the second tower know where the target device is? Or, how does the system know which tower is nearest to the target so it can send it there?

I'm assuming phones connect to a tower and the system keeps track of what devices are connected to what towers.

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When a message is sent on a LAN, it obviously first hits the gateway. Is the gateway connected via high speed cables to a cell tower? If so, that goes against what was said in the content about cell towers receiving the radio waves as your gateway instead would be serving that role.

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I wonder about this from time to time and always forget that wonderful thing that many of us pass by every day - the radio/cell tower(s)!

How would we function without them? Carrier pigeons, obviously.

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You missed out that the cell towers are usually connected to mobile switching centers, which in turn connect to the PSTN.

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Can you do a content on how Cellular data signal wave works? Eg: the signal distance a tower can cover and will someone get signal if you get closer to the tower?