Comment by mlyle
2 years ago
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...
You can get things like [1] - an RF blocking box with a window and attached RF-blocking gloves. This equipment is not at all exotic.
And if you don't like that option - you can also place test calls to 911 [2] by calling their non-emergency number and arranging a time. It would be easy to perform a once-a-month test call.
[1] https://jretest.com/product/jre-1812f-forensics-analysis-enc... [2] https://www.911.gov/calling-911/frequently-asked-questions/
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$50k is chump change for Google. Regardless, there are costs and regulations associated with making a phone, and if you aren’t willing to adhere to that, you’d better keep making search engines and other websites.
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Our primary concern is dialer crashing! I don't understand why you're trying to shift the blame away from Google. That's just stupid.
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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.