Happens all the time with low-band VHF. Two things happen, first of all signals get ducted between two moist layers of air with a dry layer of air separating them. Secondly, every 11 years there is a major sunspot peak and the ionosphere gets active enough to reflect low band VHF.
Back in 1978 there were folks on the east coast getting TV interference which turned out to be the BBC. NTSC [i.e., US] sets couldn't lock up on the signal but you could tune the audio in clearly with a little tweaking of the fine tuning control.
We should be seeing another nice peak in another four or five years, depending on how things go.
A family member worked at a military base served by a PBX and we never had any problems. I visited the switchboard room and it was very professional. There were no reports of problems calling other installations.
They used Autovon regularly, but just as a national dialing method via regular phones.
_Very_ iffy. The handshake is longer than the typical duration of any of those events involving a moving element.
Further, it would have 'auto-corrected' at the next self-id interval, a matter of a few minutes only. Again, this would have shown in the telco logs, a jump from one tower to a 'distant' one, for _one_ polling interval, followed by a jump back to the original (or one nearby) tower. Two discontinuities on adjacent intervals, and you know there's something funny going on. :)
That simply _isn't_ an issue on the common/shared 'control' channel.
If that phone was _making_ or _receiving_ a call, that is accurate. and I already discussed that situation in the original response.
As far as the control channel goes, that kind of congestion just doesn't happen. Sub-millisecond messages, with circa 100 seconds between repeats, and you can manage 100,000-plus phones from a single tower. Can't do nearly that many calls, but except in _very_ rare situations, not everybody is 'on' the phone at the same time.
I'd regard a _single_ report with suspicion, too. OTOH, if I have a _string_ of such reports, showing spacial consistency -- especially if the target was _in_motion_ -- I would tend to give it considerable credence.
I can't speak to the situation for the Australian case cited, but contemporary U.S. cell systems -- where the phone is -not- GPS equipped -- use *triangulation* from multiple towers to get a fairly precise (i.e., very close to as good as un-augmented GPS) position. That methodology is _very_ difficult to fool by freak events. Especially as the number of towers that report the signal increases.
One service the old Bell System provided for large subscribers was a national private switchable network for the organization; something more sophisticated than mere tie-lines. A person in one location could dial direct to anyone in another location. There were various names, one was "SCAN", though I don't recall what it stood for.
***** Moderator's Note *****
I would just *love* to have been a fly on _that_ wall! Imaging the accountants from Ernst & Young sitting across the table from the Bell Labs statisticians, debating the value of a network that deprived AT&T of lots of long distance revenue at the same time it guaranteed that EY employees could dial more quickly.
I bet that got into a food fight during the argument over hookswitch-to-shoulder intervals and their relevance to the net aggregate dial interval differential. ;-)
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