Talk:Cellular network

Expert needed
the general characteristics paragraph seems to have it all wrong mixing frequency reuse of cell base stations with access methods of transcievers in a single cell. please confirm or infirm. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.165.211.235 (talk) 20:56, 4 December 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree. The opening paragraphs are a mess and rather misleading. I used to teach this stuff at a graduate level in university and could attempt a rewrite, but frankly I'm sick of putting effort into something and having some twit come after me and remove my "vandalization".JimBreen (talk) 04:30, 10 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Good article. Hope you don't mind some of my minor alterations. Often wondered how exactly call transfer between cells worked! Markalex 09:01, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)
 * thanks. Actually I'm keen to get alterations in.. It took me a while to write it and at some point you stop being able to see your own mistakes, so I put it up to get other people to comment.. Mozzerati 09:14, 2004 Jun 19 (UTC)

The following things could valuably be added to this article:


 * cell coverage diagrams from a network planning tool, ideally like the following
 * a mountain area
 * a city area.
 * a flat plane area (show best serving cell, not signal strength)
 * A historical discussion
 * references to text books

This topic should not go into details of different coverage areas imo. This should be kept general: more in-depth topics should be covered under another topic/sub-topic. Robert Syputa (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 04:50, 31 May 2009 (UTC).

What actually is cellular network?? Can anybody respond? Sravya Buddha (talk) 13:27, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Cellular telephony
I have copied some text away from the mobile phone page and put it here as it is more relevant. I havent yet done a check on redundancy with the rest of the article - I'm sure it could be boiled down further, but that is best done on this page rather than the main mobile phone one in my view

ChrisUK 13:29, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Punctuation: Movement from cell to cell and handover section
There's a full stop (period) missing from the last sentence in the first paragraph in this section. I'm not sure whether it's missing any text as well. It's been that way since the article was created. Can someone take a look and fix please?

Gimboid13 05:02, 6 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Well it's been a while so I think I'll just wing it and add the thing myself. Why not be bold? Gimboid13 08:08, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex
A mention of OFDM may be appropriate in the last paragraph of the CELLULAR TELEPHONY section. OFDM is an established modulation standard, and well suited for wireless. It may be rolled out for 4G cell phones and facilitate broadband features like video. It's finding many uses in wireless applications like the wireless LAN IEEE (802.11x), IEEE 802.15, and the higher-powered WiMax (IEEE 802.16), though WiMax is not technically "cellular" per se. OFDM offers enhanced capabilities in mitigating multipath fading and its spectral efficiency renders a broader bandwidth. OFDMA, VOFDM (Vector OFDM), SOFDMA are variants of this modulation scheme.

To the the originator and contributors: Good article. Thanks.

DonL 20:17, 5 June 2006 (UTC)


 * See also the comment below noting that it doesn't discuss LTE, which is the way OFDMA is being rolled out for cell phones. Guy Harris (talk) 18:54, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Sounds like a textbook
This article sounds like a textbook chapter on cellular networks, using taxi radio systems as an illustrative example. This really needs to be rewritten, as I am not sure if the examples can be cut out without losing some of the meaning in the article.

-Agreed. First person usage and simplified examples seem out of place. It reads as though it was ripped from a textbook. Can anyone verify? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 150.176.244.146 (talk) 18:35, 17 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Frankly, I like the freindly tone. Not all Wiki content has to look and sound the same.  if you can do better, please try. Stephen Charles Thompson (talk) 21:37, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Why is this in here?
Why is this sentence in there...like mentioned above sounds like someones copied straight from a text book. Don't think it really need to be in there!

"In the case of the primitive taxi system that we are studying, handovers won't really be implemented. The taxi driver just moves from one frequency to another as needed. If a specific communication gets interrupted due to a loss of a signal then the taxi driver asks the controller to repeat the message. If one single taxi driver misses a particular broadcast message (e.g. a request for drivers in a particular area), the others will respond instead. If nobody responds, the operator keeps repeating the request."

—Preceding unsigned comment added by TruCido (talk • contribs) 17.24, June 20, 2007


 * It's here because someone cared enough to contribute it. Please do not destroy something that you don't understand or appreciate it; I assure you that others do.  If you have something positive to add, please contribute.  Stephen Charles Thompson (talk) 21:35, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Picture is misleading
The picture is a little misleading - it makes the impression that the cell tower (aka base station) is in the middle of the cell - in fact, it's in the corner of the cell. See here for more info. Tauntz (talk) 16:02, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Picture is misleading...not really
You can lay out the hexagonal grid either as corner-excited or center-excited. The center-excited geometry is more common in US literature. NX7U (talk) 20:02, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

The important distinction is between omni-directional antennas and directional antennas. Both were used at different times and therefore both are illustrated. Drawing the towers at the corners makes the concept of multiple channels in each cell easier to understand. Greensburger (talk) 03:59, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Major article re-org
I've just carried out a major cut and paste of the article. The content was very good but had become a little tangled up over the years. I have tried to place the material in a more logical order to help the non technical reader understand the key concepts. I've moved most of the mobile phone stuff to a single section so the specific examples are all in one place and illustrate a practical application of the concepts earlier in the article.

A few duplicate/redundant sentences were removed in this process, and I added a small number of connecting sentences, otherwise the material is the same content as before ChrisUK (talk) 20:07, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Relative Cell Count
What does "Relative Cell Count" mean in the table near the bottom? Can someone add a clarification for this to the page? Is this the number of mobile stations within a cell? And what does "relative" refer to? If it refers to the fact that a station is sharing the cell with other stations, then "cell count" need not have the adjective "relative".

Health issue
Can't we put a chapter on this topic? I can't find the articles on the topic here on wikipedia anymore. Thx Environmental Judge Brussels --SvenAERTS (talk) 22:10, 2 February 2013 (UTC)


 * One could, but a lot of the potential health effects would come from the part of the network that you're holding next to your head, and this page is mostly covering the network that supports the mobile phones, not the mobile phones themselves. Mobile telephony is the page about the topic of mobile telephony in general, and its "human health" section does discuss the issue, and refers the reader to a page that discusses the topic in more detail.


 * A section that specifically discussed the health effects of, say, cell phone towers might belong here; it needn't give full details about the effects of radiation from cell towers, as it could refer the reader to the "health hazards of base stations" section of the mobile phone radiation and health page. Guy Harris (talk) 23:38, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Article is hopelessly outdated
The article needs to drop the CDMA vs TDMA arguments and focus on LTE 24.19.160.57 (talk) 15:59, 1 May 2013 (UTC)


 * This article also needs to avoid recentism. It should obviously discuss LTE, but it should still discuss TDMA and CDMA in a historical context.  (It should also note that CDMA won those arguments; 3G networks all use CDMA, even if they don't all use CDMA2000.) Guy Harris (talk) 18:52, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Advantages
I rewrote the "advantages" list in the intro to be more concrete - better vs. what and why. Otherwise it sounded a bit like an advertisment and didn't make much sense since it was comparing cell networks to multiple alternatives all at once. There was one I still couldn't make sense of:
 * reduced interference from other signals

I'm not sure what it's comparing to. If anyone has any insights, feel free to add a clarified version back into the article. -- Beland (talk) 02:12, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

Celluar radio and duplicate content
Cellular radio redirects to mobile phone. In general, it's unclear if it's useful to maintain a distinction in this article between "how a cell phone network works" and how non-phone cellular networks work. If there are any non-phone cellular networks, it would be really helpful to name those specific technologies and explain how they are different from cell phones. Not sure if "push-to-talk over cellular" is technically much different and whether or not it uses normal phone numbers or normal cellular data connections. -- Beland (talk) 02:48, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

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Why is GPRS / EDGE / Evolved EDGE indented under cmdaOne and not GSM?
The topic article cmdaOne does not mention GPRS / EDGE / Evolved EDGE. However, the topic article GSM does mention GPRS / EDGE. The link / url in top article Cellular network for GPRS is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPRS which redirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Packet_Radio_Service. The link / url in topic article GSM for General Packet Radio Service links directly to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Packet_Radio_Service. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1702:3C80:9270:817C:364D:F267:514E (talk) 02:33, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
 * The answer to the question in the section title is "because the article was wrong". It has been fixed. Guy Harris (talk) 03:08, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
 * It was put there in this edit; I'm not sure what the intent was, but the result was wrong. Guy Harris (talk) 03:23, 19 July 2020 (UTC)