You are lucky the ship fakes cellular service enough that phones connect! The extra effort to include a back end spell checker might have been too much :{
Spell checkers are built into phones and take remarkably little work to implement. IMO he’s just a sloppy speller. The amature.
The tech use is a little… well, a lot, handwaving. It’s entirely possible, several ways even. But it would require registering and configuring the handsets. And that only works if someone thought to bring the required non-moving hardware to spread around the ship, set it up, and provide some way for people to hook up. That stays the same whether you set up cellurlar, wifi, or both.
(It might be possible to do with “mesh”, no not the little boxes sold as “mesh wifi”, but that again would first require installing an app that can do the mesh trickery on many phones, as they now use each other to pass messages along. So there needs to be some “stepping stone” path of handsets in range of each other, to your recipient, which doesn’t seem to be the case in this scene.)
A real-world example of providing local infrastructure is “eventphone”: A bunch of people go to a techie conference, taking their private telephone switch with them. Once there, they spread the required antennas all over the venue or camp. Then they allow other conference-goers to bring their own phones and connect. Usually DECT (mobile handsets) and SIP (desk or S/W) phones, even some ISDN, but GSM also. It definitely gets you voice, maybe texting.
That’s a bit like trying to make a covert call recorder stand in for a phone switch. It can elbow itself in front (“perform a man-in-the-middle attack”), but by itself is not a substitute for the telephone switching you need to set up calls, route messages, and so on. It’s also specialised, highly localised, and expensive and cumbersome to obtain.
It’d be much simpler and cheaper to, say, drop wifi APs all around the ship, wire them up to some central point with (networking) switches, and add a VoIP switch (and hope “Voice over WiFi” works on the handset–DECT and GSM are much better at roaming, for one) and a messaging server of some stripe. There’d still be some registering the handset step, but then, that’s the case with normal phone use too.
So whichever way you look at it, building the infrastructure takes a good bit of work, and it’d require familiarity with earth-tech. So who would’ve done that setting up?
You are lucky the ship fakes cellular service enough that phones connect! The extra effort to include a back end spell checker might have been too much :{
Spell checkers are built into phones and take remarkably little work to implement. IMO he’s just a sloppy speller. The amature.
The tech use is a little… well, a lot, handwaving. It’s entirely possible, several ways even. But it would require registering and configuring the handsets. And that only works if someone thought to bring the required non-moving hardware to spread around the ship, set it up, and provide some way for people to hook up. That stays the same whether you set up cellurlar, wifi, or both.
(It might be possible to do with “mesh”, no not the little boxes sold as “mesh wifi”, but that again would first require installing an app that can do the mesh trickery on many phones, as they now use each other to pass messages along. So there needs to be some “stepping stone” path of handsets in range of each other, to your recipient, which doesn’t seem to be the case in this scene.)
A real-world example of providing local infrastructure is “eventphone”: A bunch of people go to a techie conference, taking their private telephone switch with them. Once there, they spread the required antennas all over the venue or camp. Then they allow other conference-goers to bring their own phones and connect. Usually DECT (mobile handsets) and SIP (desk or S/W) phones, even some ISDN, but GSM also. It definitely gets you voice, maybe texting.
another hardware example could be the Stingray for man-in-the-middle surveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker
That’s a bit like trying to make a covert call recorder stand in for a phone switch. It can elbow itself in front (“perform a man-in-the-middle attack”), but by itself is not a substitute for the telephone switching you need to set up calls, route messages, and so on. It’s also specialised, highly localised, and expensive and cumbersome to obtain.
It’d be much simpler and cheaper to, say, drop wifi APs all around the ship, wire them up to some central point with (networking) switches, and add a VoIP switch (and hope “Voice over WiFi” works on the handset–DECT and GSM are much better at roaming, for one) and a messaging server of some stripe. There’d still be some registering the handset step, but then, that’s the case with normal phone use too.
So whichever way you look at it, building the infrastructure takes a good bit of work, and it’d require familiarity with earth-tech. So who would’ve done that setting up?
he spelled “great” wrong too