General > General Technical Chat
How do text messages travel from one phone carrier to another?
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Beamin:
Say I have Verizon in MD and send it to a att phone in MA. It goes over a data channel in CDMA to my local tower then it ____________________ tower transmits on a voice/data channel to the gsm handset?

...then the tower has an internet connection goes to local isp  somehow connects to sprints network then goes to the tower...

But no because many remote towers were in places that didn't have the internet when texts came out in the 2000's. Could it have sent the texts over a phone line where my local tower literally calls another remote tower over twisted pair and a telco exchange?
Problem with this one is that every tower would have its own phone number and need a huge amount of incoming phone lines and the "handshake" with a dial up connection is way to slow even if it picks up the instant it hears a ring AC signal.

Wasn't it because of this complexity that the original GSM standard used a satellite up link from each tower and down link on every tower therefor not needing local telco's to handle the exchanges? I haven't in the US ever seen any geo stationary antennas or dishes on dedicated cell towers. I do know that your prefix with your carrier is actually located at one of the local telcos, or at least it was in the 2000's just like you land line twisted pair at your house was.

There is a hundred ways to do this but finding reliable info seems to be just generic stuff on google. IS the internet now completely divorced from the phone company like it was back in the day moving along twisted pairs? Who owns the actual fibers? The town who owns the tel poles or the company using them? 
IanB:
Don't you realize that the Internet has always run over the phone companies' wires? Ever since the 1970's? The Internet IS the phone system, always has been. All that has happened over the years is that the phone companies have upgraded their backbones from copper wires to microwave links to fiber. Over the same period all phone conversations became digitized and sent as digitally compressed audio over the same links.
Beamin:

--- Quote from: IanB on December 01, 2018, 11:54:30 pm ---Don't you realize that the Internet has always run over the phone companies' wires? Ever since the 1970's? The Internet IS the phone system, always has been. All that has happened over the years is that the phone companies have upgraded their links from copper wires to microwave links to fiber. Over the same period all phone conversations became digitized and sent as digitally compressed audio over the same links.

--- End quote ---

But in the 90's things started changing and cable companies started making up the back bone. I remember my father designing much of the boards that connected it together.

How did they over come that 52k over twisted pairs speed limit? Or did the telco implement the 52k dial up speeds ( remember your 56k modem never went above 52k?) because they needed to conserve bandwidth over their lines?
IanB:
The basic copper phone wires only existed between your house and the local telephone exchange. A long time ago, starting in the 60's, the connections between telephone exchanges started being upgraded to higher and higher capacity channels making up the data backbone. Everyone operating a bit of the backbone had an agreement to share each other's data and pass data across the boundaries between one company's network and another. When new companies started adding to the backbone they joined in with the data sharing agreement.

This is partly what network neutrality is all about. The idea is that once the data is on the backbone it is just data and everyone has equal responsibility to share it around and pass it across each other's networks. Everyone shares equally and the costs all balance out in the end.

When one company says "that data is special and we are going to charge extra to carry it", that is when net neutrality goes wrong. Suddenly you get retaliatory pricing, protectionism, and limits on the free flow of data.
Beamin:

--- Quote from: IanB on December 02, 2018, 12:07:31 am ---The basic copper phone wires only existed between your house and the local telephone exchange. A long time ago, starting in the 60's, the connections between telephone exchanges started being upgraded to higher and higher capacity channels making up the data backbone. Everyone operating a bit of the backbone had an agreement to share each other's data and pass data across the boundaries between one company's network and another. When new companies started adding to the backbone they joined in with the data sharing agreement.

This is partly what network neutrality is all about. The idea is that once the data is on the backbone it is just data and everyone has equal responsibility to share it around and pass it across each other's networks. Everyone shares equally and the costs all balance out in the end.

When one company says "that data is special and we are going to charge extra to carry it", that is when net neutrality goes wrong. Suddenly you get retaliatory pricing, protectionism, and limits on the free flow of data.

--- End quote ---

So everything traveled over twisted copper pairs? That must have been terribly slow. Even by the 90's lots of data started moving around even with several thousand dial up users per town they handled that with fiber?
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