not per cell. per tower, sure, but a tower contains tens of individual cells. i've been to places where there are just two or three cells on days where there are a couple of hundred people and the signal just craps out.
lime
joined 2 years ago
there's also MIMO, which lets one device relay a 5G signal for another. i don't think most people appreciate losing battery to route someone elses call though.
without reading the article: it's because every device connected to a cell halves the bandwidth available to each device, and after something like 30-40 devices the cell is full. so it hands over to another available cell, which may also be full. which means that if you're in a crowd of thousands, your phone desperately bounces off of every cell it can see and keeps getting rejected, boosting its signal every time to get farther away.
this is why we have mobile cell towers for events.
probably from 3g