What will happen to your phone if 100 people call it at the same time?

Will it really break or burst? Could it even burn up?
This question touches on the hidden world of how our gadgets communicate.
All our phones, cars, computers, and tablets communicate using waves of invisible light—or, more accurately, using flashes of invisible light. If we could see this light, all our devices would be constantly sparkling and blinking with colorful flashes. When you start a call, your phone begins “blinking” with this invisible light.
What’s interesting is that this light can pass through buildings and walls, and the nearest cell tower can immediately “see” it (catch the signal). The tower looks roughly like this. The “eyes” of our gadgets are antennas. On the tower, they are hidden inside those white panels. Besides the tower with its antennas, a base station also needs an entire room of computer equipment.
So what do cells have to do with it? They’re called cellular because towers are placed all over the world wherever people live, so that each one communicates with all the phones within its own area. It ends up looking like a honeycomb: each “cell” is a tower that hums and blinks in all directions, talking to any phone that enters its circle.
New, modern towers are built so that one tower covers three cells at once. And the size of one such cell is about 15 kilometers. That’s why it’s not so easy to spot one. True, if we’re talking about the mobile internet network rather than cellular voice calls, there are many more towers, and you can see them much more often.

In each cell—or in each “super-cell” (made of three cells)—there is a slightly different “communication language” between phones and the tower. They “blink” at slightly different rates. For a human there’s no difference (especially since we can’t see this light), but for the devices, the different blinking helps them avoid getting confused by all the signals coming from different directions and different phones.
In its blinking light language, your phone first introduces itself and sends a whole list of its names, and then asks the cell tower, “May I talk to another phone?” But the tower doesn’t know that—it can only forward the message to the main tower, which is usually one for an entire city (if the city isn’t large) and has many, many antenna “eyes” watching all the cells. This is the central switch. Let’s call this main tower the queen of the cells.
The queen has a big computer that knows about all phones—who is where, and in which cell. And if it doesn’t know, it can ask. When the queen finds the phone you want to call, she asks the local tower near that phone to contact it. And if the person accepts the call, a communication channel is created.
How does that happen? A person says words. The phone translates human language into the blinking-light language and sends the message to the nearby cell tower. The tower, using another blinking-light language (a radio signal), sends the message to the queen of the cells. The queen sends the message to the cell tower near the other person, which sends it to that phone—and the phone translates it back into voice sound. That’s the communication channel, and everything in it happens very fast—because light is the fastest thing in the universe.
Why don’t the signals get mixed up? Each phone constantly sends its unique name, like signing its message. Also, each phone’s blinking-light language is slightly different. The towers and the queen of the cells can easily tell many messages apart at once, because they have many “eyes” and a big computer that can process many channels of communication simultaneously.
Now we’re ready to find out what happens if 100 other phones call one phone at the same time. Imagine you’re in a room with 100 people and they all ask you a question at once. You can’t answer everyone at the same time—but you can answer one by one. Everyone else will have to wait their turn. And that’s why a regular phone can accept only one call at a time.