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Comment by Melatonic | Hacker News Reader

Seems like they could have one of those mini femtocells that cellphone companies will send you if you have no reception at your place - these just plug into your home internet and then rebroadcast a 3G or 4G signal. I still have an older 3G one from Sprint I am keeping around (probably wont even work anymore).

One of these could temporarily be plugged in on request - they could have just a few of them (at whoever is head of IT) for different carriers just for this situation.

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I'm curious how much bandwidth these require. Antarctica has very, very little bandwidth.

Each simultaneous call costs you ~100Kbps. An SMS is 140 bytes, and limited by desired SMS throughput. I use a T-Mobile femtocell with a SpaceX Dishy, but VSAT (64 Kbps up to 8 Mbps) should be fine for SMS only.

https://explorersweb.com/starlink-in-antarctica/

McMurdo could run their own BTS and provide SMS access only to mobile phones if the desire and funding was available. This would give you a legit mobile network registration.

http://openbts.org/

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/6/23389641/ukama-open-sourc...

I haven’t heard of femtocells and now wondering why we don’t use these instead of WiFi? In my experience LTE connections are much more reliable than WiFi - rarely having mobile data issues but WiFi won’t work in the next room.

Are femtocells just as crappy as WiFi?

They're slow and use licensed bands

In Dubai apartments are full of these things that you the phone company just shows up and plugs in; they connect to the building fibre rather than being linked to you personally or you personally paying for them https://www.reddit.com/r/dubai/comments/on8gdh/we_recently_m...

Why use femtocell over Wi-Fi? It costs same as normal mobile data usage (maybe it depends). It's generally slower than Wi-Fi because not much bandwidth is assigned for it. No LAN connectivity. Its routing isn't optimal for just internet access because it routes home-ISP-internet-mobileISP-internet, instead of home-ISP-internet.

I have one of those. It requires a GPS signal to work, and instantly stops working if it isn't at your registered home address, which I assume cannot be Antarctica.

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