Culture
Why Your Cell Phone Drops Calls in Dense Cities
With each advancement in network speed comes the need for more physical infrastructure
Cell phones are small packages filled with big promises. They vow to let you cut two cords—phone and Internet—while compressing the necessary infrastructure into tall, tidy towers. No more dangling phone lines or unaesthetic cable boxes, just speedy connections to calls and emails. But the game is changing, and that same infrastructure that cell phones so handily pushed further from end users is steadily creeping back.
Cell towers are like other types of infrastructure in that they are inextricably linked with population density. More people means more towers. But where other industries can count on technological advances to help ease the problem, the rapid pace of development is actually compounding the problem for cell phone companies.