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Wireless Networking Communications The Internet

Mount Everest Gets 4G Connectivity 125

Posted by Soulskill from the good-place-to-work-from-when-your-power-goes-out dept.
hypnosec writes "Huawei, in collaboration with China Mobile, has successfully deployed 4G services on Mount Everest, about 5,200 meters above sea level. Announcing the development, Huawei revealed that work was completed last month and users can now access 4G services like streaming live HD videos from the base camp on the mountain."
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Mount Everest Gets 4G Connectivity More

Mount Everest Gets 4G Connectivity

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  • Conversion to foot (Score:5, Funny)

    by Conversion Bot v2 ( 2975137 ) on Saturday July 06, 2013 @02:58PM (#44204737)
    If you were wondering, 5200 meters is about 17 ft. That is 19 ft above sea level.

    • If you were wondering, 5200 meters is about 17 ft. That is 19 ft above sea level.

      Yeah, you might want to double check that. More like 17k (thousand) ft. Not 17 feet, the height of my ladder.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everest_Base_Camp [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:Conversion to foot (Score:5, Funny)

      by jonbryce ( 703250 ) on Saturday July 06, 2013 @03:08PM (#44204803) Homepage

      17060 feet. You wouldn't per chance work for NASA?

      • Re:Conversion to foot (Score:5, Informative)

        by erpbridge ( 64037 ) <steve AT erpbridge DOT com> on Saturday July 06, 2013 @03:13PM (#44204839) Journal

        Having thought about it, guessing he was talking about 5,200 meters with the thinking that in certain places in the world, they use a comma rather than a decimal point to represent the division between partial units. In that case, 5,200 metres = 5.200 meters = 17.0604 feet = 17,0604 feet in that particular case.

        But Everest Base camp (either south or north, both on a fairly broad area) are most certainly not a handful of meters above sea level.

        • That is why when talking with people in the Internet you should never, ever use the thousand unit separator. At most you can use space as a separator. At least that one is not likely to be mistaken for the unit separator.

          • In _real_ languages like Ada and Verilog you can use the underscore as an optional thousand unit separator.

            • In _real_ languages like Ada and Verilog

              You forgot Ruby. Or perhaps not.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

              In _real_ languages like Ada and Verilog you can use the underscore as an optional thousand unit separator.

              I wonder why more programming languages don't incorporate a separator that is ignored on number parsing. Like underscores. They're extremely handy (and very useful if you could use it arbitrarily in case you need to break the number into oddly shaped groups). Especially when you're dealing with 64-bit numbers which are starting to get a bit long to type out and missing a digit is a likely possibility.

          • That is why when talking with people in the Internet you should never, ever use the thousand unit separator.

            This is why on Slashdot, you should always use the "E" notation for floating point numbers. Example: 5.2e3 meters. Completely unambiguous to any Slashdotter.

        • I thought that at first, but then I noticed he said "...5200 meters is..."

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

          No, I'm pretty sure 5.200 meters is the height of 5 and 1/5th standard US parking meters stacked on top of each other.

      • Is this why the Mars landing craft crashed?
    • Look like it's time for Conversion Bot v3

  • Be careful (Score:5, Informative)

    by lesincompetent ( 2836253 ) on Saturday July 06, 2013 @03:02PM (#44204767)
    Video streaming? Only if you get proper authorization [bbc.co.uk] first!

    • roaming costs are higher then that fee.

      A video call at $15-$20 a meg.

  • Other way around (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Oh, thought it was for the climbers to view porn.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      As a bonus, you can enjoy slow, auto-erotic asphyxiation white masturbating.

  • You're not impressing anybody by climbing this joke of a mountain.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Scutter ( 18425 )

      How is it a "joke of a mountain"?

      • The GP must be planning to make an ascent of Mt. Olympus [wikipedia.org] once Elon is offering commercial transit.

    • Re:Mount Everest is a fucking joke (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dzimas ( 547818 ) on Saturday July 06, 2013 @03:40PM (#44204997)
      3,142 people have summited Everest a total of 5,104 times. Two hundred and nineteen people have lost their lives, with a quarter dying after reaching the summit. That's a 6.97% fatality rate. It's hardly something to joke about.

      • 3,142 people have summited Everest a total of 5,104 times. Two hundred and nineteen people have lost their lives, with a quarter dying after reaching the summit. That's a 6.97% fatality rate.

        No it's not. You're using the wrong denominator. If you're going to use the number of times Everest has been summitted as the denominator, then you need to compare to deaths among those who reached the summit. A quarter of 219 = 55. 55/5104 = 1.1% fatality rate.

        If you're going to calculate a fatality rate based

      • 3,142 people have summited Everest a total of 5,104 times. Two hundred and nineteen people have lost their lives, with a quarter dying after reaching the summit. That's a 6.97% fatality rate. It's hardly something to joke about.

        With today's ultralight gear and portable O2 its not quite the same climb that it used to be. And if you are paying a "guide" to carry your gear and extra O2 tanks its even less so. Not everyone who get their photo taken at the summit has "truly" climbed Everest.

      • But look at the trend [statista.com]. About 70% of the total ascents in history have been since 2005.

        Now look at how the death rate has changed over time [data360.org] - it dropped dramatically by 1990, and remained at that lower number [bbc.co.uk] even as the number of ascents soared. So talking about the death rate going back to the 1950s is quite misleading.

      • Life has a 100% fatality rate. It's something to joke about.

        What's black and white and red all over? A nun beaten to death. Ha ha! Classic.

        I.e. just because you might not find it funny, doesn't mean that there should never be jokes made about it. Just because you find the topic serious, doesn't mean everyone does.

        Also, the GP didn't even mention people dying. You did. Why do you think it's at all relevant to the GP's post?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Dzimas ( 547818 )
          The guy was flaming, claiming that the act of climbing the mountain was a joke. It's not. It's damn hard and extremely dangerous.

    • They had never been that high before...

    • Hey! You do realise that you're talking about the mountain with the biggest tits in the world [montypython.net], don't you?

      Show a little respect, please.

  • ...from Everest. Because it's there.

  • Verizon can't provide any 4G, or even reliable 3G coverage in my neighborhood, yet Everest climbers have good enough 4G coverage to stream HD video!?

    • Verizon can't provide any 4G, or even reliable 3G coverage in my neighborhood, yet Everest climbers have good enough 4G coverage to stream HD video!?

      The topography is favorable, the max user load is easily estimated, and the telco gets good PR out of it.
      I doubt your neighborhood can claim 2/3 of those things.

    • Verizon can't provide any 4G, or even reliable 3G coverage in my neighborhood, yet Everest climbers have good enough 4G coverage to stream HD video!?

      I was thinking something similar... but with a different carrier. I barely can get service in my neighborhood in a city that is in the sprawl of one of the largest 50 cities in the country..

  • Considering that people visit and climb everest from all over the world with phones from all carriers (including phones without SIM cards), wouldn't adding extensive wifi not make more sense? At least I'm guessing that these 4g towers will only work with Huawei as individual 4g implementations tend to be carrier specific. It would be nice to know that I could bring my Sprint phone to Everest and be able to stream, blog, and Skype with it. I'm not saying you can't have 4g also, but if it's limited to a si

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fred911 ( 83970 )

      The US is the only country with CDMA phones. ROW uses sim based GSM phones.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by wjcofkc ( 964165 )
        Thank you for clarifying that. It also occurs to me that in order to have wifi, you would also first need some sort of other broadband internet in place... so I guess that's that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AK Marc ( 707885 )
        When the rest of the world used CDMA (and they do), they used CDMA2000, and used SIMs with CDMA. So don't bash CDMA for a US market failure.
      • Bell and Telus in Canada maintain a fairly extensive CDMA network, even though it has been largely deprecated with an HSPA overlay that is compatible with 3G / 4G / LTE as well.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

        Japan uses WCDMA. Most phones have a SIM, but a few carrier branded ones apparently do not.

        My quad band GS3 works in Europe and Japan, not sure about the US.

    • Use a triple-band or quadri-band phone, and it will work everywhere in the world.

  • Problem is, I know that adding this makes sense from a safety perspective, and it might even save lives. But my gut tells me it's taking something away from the adventure, the essence of the human experience that drives men and women to attempt dangerous feats and explore the unknown.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jjohnson ( 62583 )

      The sense of adventure in climbing Everest was wounded when they started having traffic jams on the way to the summit, and finally killed when an 80 year old man summited, while being chased by his 81 year old rival. It's a fucking tourist destination now, albeit one that periodically suffers mass casualty events.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by memnock ( 466995 )

        ... albeit one that periodically suffers mass casualty events.

        Sounds like the adventure still exists to some extent.

        Based on recent media, Everest does sound like it's turned into some kind of tourist trap, instead of a remote, arduous frontier. What frontiers remain that haven't turned into prime time television scenery?

  • Isn't part of the point of visiting a remote location such as this the fact that you're at arms length from civilisation? Or are people so fucking shallow now that climbing the worlds tallest mountain is nothing without being able to tweet about it to other vacuous morons from the top?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      Isn't part of the point of visiting a remote location such as this the fact that you're at arms length from civilisation? Or are people so fucking shallow now that climbing the worlds tallest mountain is nothing without being able to tweet about it to other vacuous morons from the top?

      haha, everest for retreating from society ?!?! hahaha hahahaha ahahah, you're talking about a place where most everyone has personal hired help, even if they don't have that at home and pretty much everyone goes there for bragging rights. you'd be better off mining gold in lapland for retreating from civilization! no queues there, unlike at mt everest.

      shitloads of mosquitos though in lapland in summer..

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )
      "Hey! Guess where I am."
    • If you want a challenge, the K2 is smaller than the Everest, but it kills much more people
  • I was going to say Chinese government is trying to steal private information from people using their network. That was before the NSA's spying plan being made public. Now I would just say please feel free to steal my personal private information.

  • It's for... (Score:3)

    by Coppit ( 2441 ) on Saturday July 06, 2013 @06:21PM (#44205955) Homepage

    Frostbite porn?

    • Professional web design and Development Company from UK. Offering made to W3C standards compliant website designs and development solution.http://idragontech.co.uk/company/


  • "Huawei, in collaboration with China Mobile, has successfully deployed 4G services on Mount Everest, about 5,200 meters above sea level. Announcing the development, Huawei revealed that work was completed last month and users can now access 4G services like streaming live HD videos from the base camp on the mountain."
    Given that Huawei is more or less an arm of the Chinese government, those services might as well be a glorified CPC tap - with the same restrictions as those placed within the PRC.

    (oh, and befo

  • Cool (Score:1)

    by koan ( 80826 )

    Do we feel good about this?

  • Tibetan Base Camp (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Does everyone miss the point that this would be the Chinese base camp and not the one in Nepal?

  • I'm the king of the world LOLL!!!!11one

  • A Walmart and a McDonalds are built on top of Everest...

  • south of NASA Parkway in the nice, suburban area with lots of subscribers, or North of the Woodlands where there's lots of subscribers. Or across the street from their own corporate stores in Louisiana that sell 4G phones. They have one horse population 1,000 towns in way out nowhere East Texas covered, but dammit, those not quite white collar urban and suburban areas just aren't worth paying attention to.

  • Mt Everest become Chinese? Despite being "right on the border" I'm pretty sure the country that it's known for being in is Nepal, not China.

    Even Google Maps says it's in some province of Tibet, yet clearly marks Everest as being on the Nepalese side.

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