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I have the sort of completely bonkers writing question that is incredibly hard to google for: would cell towers in 2001 or 2002 work with a modern smartphone? Assuming you went back in time to 2002. Which is what has happened to this character in the thing I'm writing. That is, would your modern smartphone have bars and be able to place calls, or would it just act like there were no cell towers around?

Or would it depend on whether your service provider was compatible with the local companies providing towers?

Or is that a total "WTF, just make something up" kind of question?

Ideally, I would prefer it to not work, but this character is in New York City, so if it's going to work at all, it would probably work here.

ETA: I have a number of great answers and I think I'm set; see comments for details! General consensus seems to be that the phone would technically be able to use the network but wouldn't be able to authenticate without a local SIM card/service plan, which sounds good to me and I'm going with it.

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Hmm. Rather than actual cell towers, wouldn't it be an issue of figuring out with generation (2G or 3G?) networks were operating on at that time in your protagonist's area? A quick search turned up this article, which mostly goes into how old devices won't be compatible with new networks, but also explains how the networks developed over time, and might make a good starting point?

Ah, thank you! I hadn't even thought about it in terms of networks; I guess I was thinking hardware. But you're right, and from that article, it looks like 3G wasn't around yet, so it would have been 2G. Now to figure out if a modern smartphone can still run on a 2G network ...

(All this for a scene that is maybe 4 paragraphs long. XD)

p.s. This led me to this page of different countries' cell frequencies, which includes THE MOON. Apparently there is going to be 4G on the moon soon?? Truly, we are living in the future.

WHAT. Okay then! Sure, 4G on the moon, why not. (The future is sometimes overwhelming.)

THE MOON? //delighted

Okay, that's... well, yes, welcome to the future!! :D

(I suspect Rodney might be behind this, lol!!)

Verdict from the spouse is:
A lot of tech was just starting to be used in NYC in 2002 that is still supported by modern smartphones, eg. in 2002 some providers were starting to support 1xRTT(EV-DO), which modern iPhones (at least) do still support. However, if the story were set in 2001, it's likely the phone couldn't even connect to the network.

...but all this is probably irrelevant because in order to connect to the network it would have to authenticate, so even if the phone succeeded in connecting, the authentication would fail. However, due to FCC regulations any cellphone could make a 911 call in 2002!

Potentially wifi would work, assuming the smartphone supports 802.11b and WEP, which most should (but no Skype!)

PS: He really enjoyed this question :D

Edited 2019-04-19 08:32 (UTC)

Oh, that's fantastic - thank you so much! That is EXACTLY what I was hoping for - I wanted it to not work if possible, and that's much more than I knew about how cell phones work and something I wouldn't have known how to google for.

Thank you! And tell your spouse thank you from me! :)

I had never thought about it before but now I really want to know. It's such a time travel issue!

Yay for fannish friends who can figure this stuff out.

See other comments - there are some good answers!

naye's right that it's more a question of networks than cell towers - cell towers fundamentally just allocate you a specific frequency to talk on according to a specific set of standards and modern phones are very backwards-compatible so carriers can gradually transition their networks. I think 2002 is decently within the range of 3G standards for a major city - the network and standards existed in 1999, long before 3G-capable handsets did, and a character with a present-day 4G phone wouldn't have a problem connecting to a 3G network (my phone, for instance, drops back to 3G and even 2G networks in some fairly remote areas of Scotland).

I see more problems on the data side (your character will have slow internet if any & lesser quality calls, as they'll be limited to the maximum speed/quality of the 3G network) and possibly the money side (your character might have some unfortunate roaming charges when they get back to the present day, depending on whose towers they were connecting to).

Also I got got curious and maybe fell down a research rabbit hole a little bit so: if you want to see a colour-coded map of present-day 2g/3g/4g/4g+ coverage in New York by mobile carrier I, uh, found one?. And there is also this entire special issue of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing from 2002 talking about 3G networks.

ETA: I didn't think about the authentication issue, but I also found this overview of phones/networks/security, which - hm, I'd have to think about it at not-1.30am to think about how it'd pan out in your specific circumstance.

Edited (security things and another article) 2019-04-19 08:40 (UTC)

....ooh, research. Nice.

Research can definitely be the most fun part of ficwriting, ngl.

This is so interesting. Thanks!

Thank you so much for looking up all of this for me; I really appreciate it! <3 This is EXACTLY what I need to know, and I think between this and the other answers, I've got enough to get this scene to work - from the character's perspective in this scene, all he really needs to know is "does my phone work right now so I can call this person" and I think I've got adequate info to (from the sound of things) make it work plausibly on almost any level that I want to.

I love the idea of having him get back to his own time and get hit with several hundred dollars in roaming charges, though; that's hilarious.

You're welcome! It was a super fun to look into :D

It depends where your phone is from - different places use different technology. Most current iphones can do 3G but nothing earlier than that. A phone from 2014 in my area would work perfectly in 2002, but then they turned off the rural network and now some people have no access at all. My current phone wouldn't work here in 2002, but would in New York in 2002.

Most current smartphones will work with 3G, and that started to be standard in 2001, so I would absolutely expect it in NYC.

Thank you; this is great! I was not a cell phone early adopter, so I didn't know 3G was around as far back as 2001 - thank you!

I’d go for “no”, on the grounds that the network won’t recognise the phone so even if it can technically connect at the lower levels of the comm stack, it won’t be allowed service. Like taking an non-roaming contract phone to China.

Theoretically one might be able to buy a new contract Back In Time - but you wouldn’t be able to use your existing SIM because no network provider would have any details of it, and old SIMs probably wouldn’t fit in a modern phone (they’ve all gone to micro or nano SIM).

So if the purpose of the question is “can my freshly arrived time traveler pull out their phone and make a call” the answer is no. Can they (with some effort) put their futurephone on the network? Probably not unless it’s a pretty old handset.

Thank you; this is just what I needed! Based on this and the other answers, I think I'm going with "his phone can't authenticate so he can't make calls right away" (which is what works best for my plot, and from the sound of things, quite plausible), and then just deal with the issue later by having him get a local phone and/or use pay phones, which I am slightly weirded out to realize would totally still be prevalent and probably common in 2002.

I really appreciate the offer to ask your colleagues, but I think there's no need to put them to the trouble - between the various answers I think I'm set!

When the East Coast blackout of August 2003 hit, people with cell phones couldn't get through due to all the traffic of everyone with cell phones calling, so there were long lines for pay phones. I gave someone a quarter for one.

I didn't get a cell phone until late 2006, so I know that at that time there were still a lot of payphones in NYC.

If you want a definitive answer I can ask some work colleagues (who actually MAKE phones and are experts in all the protocols) on Tuesday - it’s a 4 day weekend for Easter holidays here now. :-)

On another note -- if you need someone to beta for general NYC details, I've lived here since 1983. We were relatively late adopters of smartphones though, fwiw.

Thank you! <3 I'll hit you up if there's anything I need to know.

Actually, come to think of it, I might at some point hit you up for beta details on something entirely different. I have an urban fantasy novel that is almost entirely set in NYC, and while I do have one local beta, she doesn't live in the city, she just visits it for work. So I could use someone to act as a sounding board for local authenticity. The novel is not entirely set in NYC, but a large, critical chunk of it is not only set there, but relies heavily on local history/color. I would be happy to reciprocate with beta/critique.

Edited 2019-04-19 16:40 (UTC)

Sure -- I am a big fan of my city and its history and culture!

I asked a similar question ages ago on

factfinding! I think my conclusion from the research back then is that phones are pretty backward-compatible in terms of the actual connection, the problem would be software and the fact that they don't have a service plan in the new time (and it would probably be hard to get one for a phone that doesn't exist yet.)

So if you just want it to not work, "they don't have a local service plan" will solve that. (If you want it to work, they would probably have to buy a local SIM card, which should probably work with their phone? but a c.2001 SIM card might degrade its performance in a bunch of way.)

They should still be able to use wifi afaik (the protocols haven't changed much). 2001 had a lot less "official" free wifi but it was the days of warchalking when wifi routers didn't default to password-protected and you could just wander around a residential or business area and find fully open connections. GPS/location should also still nominally work, I think, as long as the clock is correct, although it may have significant error because locations on Earth actually move over time relative to GPS and they'll have the wrong correction factors (unless they can update it somehow).

But their phone will probably complain about the out-of-date security on all the things! Also, depending on the phone, they might have to figure out how to manually set the internal clock to the correct time before they can connect to things. And a lot of apps probably won't work, since they will be trying to talk to servers that don't exist - I wouldn't count on any app that requires an internet connection to work at all. (They may also have trouble connecting even to websites that already existed, because there will be so many DNS updates needed.)

Edited 2019-04-19 13:50 (UTC)

Thank you so much; this is useful! Haha, I love the idea of trying to use their phone just being an ENDLESS series of incompatibility warnings until they're like "... fuck it" and get a local one for the current era. XD

Anyway, this is very useful, and I think between the answers I have here, I'm set! Thank you!

Wouldn't even charging it be a problem unless your time traveller had their charger with them? I mean when exactly did the modern small USB plugs that can cope with the power demands of smartphones come out?

GPS/location should also still nominally work, I think, as long as the clock is correct, although it may have significant error because locations on Earth actually move over time relative to GPS and they'll have the wrong correction factors (unless they can update it somehow).

Satellite ephemeris (location) data and clock data get transmitted as part of the GPS signal, so the phone should be able to update its own almanac to compensate. It would take a while though to get the first fix (12 minutes).

Phones also use cell towers to enhance their location accuracy but I don't fully understand how that works or how time travel might affect that.

That said, I don't think it would even matter because Google maps didn't exist in 2002 and so there would be no maps to get (unless you had already downloaded area maps to your phone, I suppose-- but those would now be inaccurate).

A lot of phones have a built-in capacity to just get current lat&long, so if you really needed it, you could figure out how to get that. Also yeah, Google Maps works works pretty well offline if you download maps. Probably not pokego though! I was actually thinking about the continental drift issue! Over a long enough period the lat &long of everywhere except Greenwich changes, and to compensate for that you have to get periodical data packets from the people who track land movement, it's not built into the signal. I think I was mislead by the fact that I hang out too much with the kind of people who play with total stations, though, it looks like back 20 years you'd be looking at two or three meters, which will really fuck up your laser scan of a cathedral but probably not matter much to anything a smartphone does.

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