Can you hear me now? Well, not if you’re chattin’ it up in the middle of a solar surface event. Disturbances on the sun’s surface, known as “solar flares” are reportedly to blame for many of the dropped calls this summer. A new research study being published in the next issue of Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), led by Queens University mathematics professor, Dr. David Thomson, concludes that man of those convo-cutting call drops can be attributed to solar flares.
Dr. Thomson explained that “You always expect some calls to be dropped, like when you get into an elevator and the doors close, or when you are standing out in the street and suddenly a tractor trailer parks right between you and the cell site. But, when we looked at the dropping problem, we found an odd solar connection to the dropped call rates.”
Solar flares are basically solar burps – high-wound magnetic fields cause solar gases to transform into a roiling mass of high-energy, ionic plasma. Once the super-heated and highly-charged plasma hits the Earth’s ionosphere something happens to affect cellular communications. Scientists are still unsure as to why the protective ionosphere is not capable of absorbing all of the solar flares energy – but its suspected that the solar flare’s interaction with the ionosphere is the key to the dropped calls.
Hopefully these scientists can figure out how to protect our wireless networks from solar events, otherwise, come 2012, we’re all screwed for cell phone communications.
[Via: Yahoo]