Did you know that while you are talking it up on your cellphone, there is a tiny microphone in the handset that converts the high and low sounds of your voice into a corresponding high and low pattern of electrical signals. You can't see it.

A microchip located inside the phone converts these signals into strings of numbers. The numbers are packed into a radio wave and beamed out from the phone’s antenna. The radio waves then travel through the air at the blazing speed of light. It searches for the nearest cellphone tower. The cellphone tower, also called a "mast", receives the signals. Those are the sticks you see all over.

The tower passes the signals on to an "exchange building", from where they are routed onward. Calls made from a cellphone to another cellphone on the same network travel to their destination by being routed to the mast nearest to the destination phone, and finally to that phone itself.

Calls made to a cellphone on a different network or a landline follow a more lengthy path. Then, they have to be routed into the main telephone network before they can reach their ultimate destination. Who'd a thunk it?