Comment by evilduck
2 years ago
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/
Who's the person who crawls into the tiny box and makes sure the dialer UI is doing the right thing, given that is what our primary concern is?
We've been talking about the cost of making a screened room. "Turnkey" ones cost about $20-50k, but you're going to pay contractors a fair bit beyond that. Not to mention whatever equipment you're putting inside.
https://www.ramayes.com/Refurbished_Radio_Frequency_Shielded...
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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.
This discussion is moot btw. Google already has faraday cage and bts equipment, at least in the London office (6ps) where a large part of the Android team is located. And obviously so - the costs involved are a rounding error for Google. The problem must be somewhere else.