Comment by denysvitali
2 years ago
A test lab is a room that is completely isolated from the outside (and in a way that the RF doesn't leak outside of the premises) where you can do these kind of experiments.
Considering the amount of teams working on the Google Dialer, and the fact that they might be distributed across multiple cities / countries - this sounds very expensive.
Building a Faraday cage is an afternoon woodworking project. You can build them in your garage or bedroom with hand tools if you wanted. You don’t even need a huge room, a portable phone booth sized space could be mass produced and delivered on site. A Faraday Booth might take a few dozen square meters of copper mesh and some basic lumber, drywall and finishing efforts. If it took more than $10k per office I’d be shocked. This is something simple and cheap enough it could be something a local director or manager could charge to their company card and assembled themselves if they really cared.
It shouldn't be too expensive, but before you put in equipment and pretend to be the phone network, you need to make sure that you're hitting regulatory limits on the amount of RF leaking out. Doing a good enough job to hit that above a gigahertz--- including things like conducted RF, and validating with measurements-- is gonna cost a bit more than you describe.
[1]. $1k, -95dB to 3GHz, in stock, manufacturer standard I/O plates sold separately. I think there's zero room for hypotheticals and challenges to talk about setting these up if you ask not webdevs but actual phone people.
1: https://jretest.com/product/jre-0912/
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Fine, for permitting and regulations and inspections, let’s 100x the cost and say it’s an annual expense too. This is still well within Google’s budgets to provide to their Android teams.
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If Google, of all companies, can't afford the necessary testing equipment for a critical function, who can? If they thought that emergency services would make them money, they could have a lab in every office. But it won't, and so they don't care.
Linus Tech Tips has one complete with an isolated private 5G network inside. I’m sure Google could manage.
Intrigued, looked up... hm. and am still wondering what they plan to do with that.
1: https://firecell.io/product/labkit/
They are building their "Labs" which aims to offer high quality testing. They also have purchased a professional power supply tester as well.
They noticed cell phone reviews over time have dropped signal or quality testing. Which makes sense since each reviewer is just testing in their local environment with no standards or baseline so they were pretty meaningless anyways.
Are they going to be able to test enough phones and wifi/radio equipment to make it worth while? Not too sure.
Arguing an expensive price tag for Google just doesn't resonate. They are building a phone - it should be able to do the one thing that it should, as others have said. Anything outside of contacting someone in an emergency should be secondary.
Society spends a few billion dollars a year on E911 and related infrastructure.
To have faith in it eroded because of a little bit of slipshod validation by phone vendors is a false economy.