Comment by numpad0
2 years ago
[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.
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/
What it seems like they really need is some general black-box testing time to try and better identify what is going on, along with looking at logs from devices of users who had the problem.
A screened room with a few devices and a simulator seems like a good resource to have, and it's a reasonable thing to procure at a center or two if they don't have it. It just costs several tens of thousands, not $10k.
It seems like at this point 911 usually works on Pixel, and there's probably even good unit test and automated integration test of a lot of the components-- prearranged test calls with a given carrier's 911 impl isn't likely to fix it. But "usually" isn't good enough: Google needs to actually figure out what's going on, no matter what.
$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.
> $50k is chump change for Google.
c.f. my comment:
> > > It shouldn't be too expensive, but
People just don't read and understand that you can agree with the broader scope of comment but not the details.
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.
> Our primary concern is dialer crashing!
Yes, so being able to use the phone UI is important for qualitative testing.
> I don't understand why you're trying to shift the blame away from Google. That's just stupid.
I feel like you didn't read my comment. I stated that a screened room isn't prohibitively expensive, but can't be delivered for the suggested $10k. In another comment, I said "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."
Why isn't it possible to have nuanced discussions-- to condemn Google's failure here, but also to suggest that the capital expense to give people realistic test environments is probably higher than others are suggesting?
Frankly, you're being abrasive.
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