Hacker News Reader

Comment by evilduck | Hacker News Reader

Building a Faraday cage is an afternoon woodworking project. You can build them in your garage or bedroom with hand tools if you wanted. You don’t even need a huge room, a portable phone booth sized space could be mass produced and delivered on site. A Faraday Booth might take a few dozen square meters of copper mesh and some basic lumber, drywall and finishing efforts. If it took more than $10k per office I’d be shocked. This is something simple and cheap enough it could be something a local director or manager could charge to their company card and assembled themselves if they really cared.

View on HN

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.

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.

[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...

$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.

You must have the UI? Call your factory, ask them make an extra ICE and hook it up to the simulator through an attenuator and shielded cables. Easy. Cost couple cars worth, so what. Add noises, simulate phasing, handover, do anything you want to. premises is, you're a top mass market smart phone manufacturer, and Google, both of that at the same time.

No, you're trying to find a way to make it sound impossible. But what you're saying is more along, probably, "finding a parking lot to test brakes is impossible even for a car company". Something real stupid as that.

No. I'm just saying that it costs like $40-100k in practice to get a screened room into operation, not $10k, but that this is still a reasonable expense.

But you're too boiling over in vitriol to understand nuance. Somehow, in your mind, saying that you can't do it for $10k appears to be me defending Google.

Even if it costs $1M, Google either has to do it or stop selling phones and recall sold units.

I think maybe GP is getting you confused with the person who brought up the suggestion it's expensive in the first place, before we started looking into what the numbers really would be. While the initial statement of that sounds like defending Google, that wasn't you, and unpacking the costs is intellectually interesting on its own merits, say, for anyone who might want to do it themselves.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com