> Again, a test lab should help towards these things, but I doubt Google has one accessible to the average engineer working on the dialer.
And why not? It seems like the real real problem is #4: Management doesn't take seriously people's need to reach emergency services because it's not a profit center.
A test lab is a room that is completely isolated from the outside (and in a way that the RF doesn't leak outside of the premises) where you can do these kind of experiments.
Considering the amount of teams working on the Google Dialer, and the fact that they might be distributed across multiple cities / countries - this sounds very expensive.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
$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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
If Google, of all companies, can't afford the necessary testing equipment for a critical function, who can? If they thought that emergency services would make them money, they could have a lab in every office. But it won't, and so they don't care.
They are building their "Labs" which aims to offer high quality testing. They also have purchased a professional power supply tester as well.
They noticed cell phone reviews over time have dropped signal or quality testing. Which makes sense since each reviewer is just testing in their local environment with no standards or baseline so they were pretty meaningless anyways.
Are they going to be able to test enough phones and wifi/radio equipment to make it worth while? Not too sure.
Arguing an expensive price tag for Google just doesn't resonate. They are building a phone - it should be able to do the one thing that it should, as others have said. Anything outside of contacting someone in an emergency should be secondary.
So how do you explain Unity and Reddit and Twitter and Wizards of the Coast all belly flopping their PR this year? I'm sure they care, in some abstract sense, about PR (well, not Musk). I just think they're out of touch and incompetent at dealing with it. Some of them are even on the record saying it will blow over and the benefits of not caring are worth the cost, like the Reddit CEO. Clearly the costs of bad PR aren't high enough.
They care if bad PR results in less money. Wizards +Unity realized they pushed too hard and will ultimately cost them. Reddit thinks their decision still makes financial sense.
And Google is making exactly the same calculation. Maybe they'll do something to fix it after a hundred people die because they can't call 911 and it blows up nationally.
And why not? It seems like the real real problem is #4: Management doesn't take seriously people's need to reach emergency services because it's not a profit center.