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Inside AT&T’s 83 GB/hour mobile cell tower

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Re: Inside AT&T’s 83 GB/hour mobile cell tower

#21

Post by quackerhacker »

BadCRC wrote: post #14

what do the AT&T vans connect to? I assume that there is no landline available for them to hook into, so how are they providing service? my guess is satellites or communicating with other cell towers but the latter seems counterproductive as it would push a high load to a different cell tower. but if they used satellites, wouldn't there by high latency and bandwidth limits?

I've actually wondered this too. I remember hearing about these temp towers at the 2013 inauguration. I understand how they allow more users to get a signal, but as you said.....what is the backhaul actually on? It could be distributed through a cell tower you may not get a signal from is my guess (like 1 that's 1mi away), or ran on a fios network (like voip).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/07/cell-phone-towers-i...

Re: Inside AT&T’s 83 GB/hour mobile cell tower

#22

Post by Matsta »

BadCRC wrote: post #14

what do the AT&T vans connect to? I assume that there is no landline available for them to hook into, so how are they providing service? my guess is satellites or communicating with other cell towers but the latter seems counterproductive as it would push a high load to a different cell tower. but if they used satellites, wouldn't there by high latency and bandwidth limits?

A few months back we were exploring a abannonded building (scheduled to be demolished), and we found there was a working cell tower ontop of the building. There was a small server room that had all the eqipment to run everything (I think it was shared by the 2 big telco's here in NZ).

From what we would could see, there were a bunch of ancient racks running 2g gear that looked at least 10 years old (all beige), and then a whole 42U rack of 12v batteries for a UPS.

Then there was a quarter-rack which had a bunch of fibre cables going into a few Huawei branded 1u boxes. LTE only got deployed a month ago so it much of been HSPA+.

I think if they had a satellite connection there would be too much latency. And the throughput wouldn't be limiting as well. They could of had one as a backup source though, or just setup as a secondary connection.

Re: Inside AT&T’s 83 GB/hour mobile cell tower

#24

Post by cmsmith »

delinka wrote: post #9
quackerhacker wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm actually outside of the LTE area, so I ran my test on 4G HSPA+. The image for the speed test was to see if they throttled at the end of the month. Just to be clear...don't try this on a supposedly Unlimited iphone data plan, or straight talk unlimited...doesn't work lol.

I'm not sure what any of this has to do with the math. You claim 128GB over a 50Mb connection. That's less than six hours of constant streaming. Unless you want to qualify it with "during the times AT&T actually provided reliable service," your numbers seem off. A lot.

You're assuming that streaming video can provide data at the same rate as speedtest. In reality those numbers are nowhere close, and don't reflect the reliability of AT&T's service.

Re: Inside AT&T’s 83 GB/hour mobile cell tower

#25

Post by btgeekboy »

BadCRC wrote: post #14

what do the AT&T vans connect to? I assume that there is no landline available for them to hook into, so how are they providing service? my guess is satellites or communicating with other cell towers but the latter seems counterproductive as it would push a high load to a different cell tower. but if they used satellites, wouldn't there by high latency and bandwidth limits?

The image at the very top of the article mentions they have a microwave backhaul (see "E"), which I'm assuming goes to another ground location (i.e. a central office.)

Re: Inside AT&T’s 83 GB/hour mobile cell tower

#26

Post by quackerhacker »

btgeekboy wrote: post #25
BadCRC wrote: post #14

what do the AT&T vans connect to? I assume that there is no landline available for them to hook into, so how are they providing service? my guess is satellites or communicating with other cell towers but the latter seems counterproductive as it would push a high load to a different cell tower. but if they used satellites, wouldn't there by high latency and bandwidth limits?

The image at the very top of the article mentions they have a microwave backhaul (see "E"), which I'm assuming goes to another ground location (i.e. a central office.)

Actually this makes better sense than what I was guessing about cell towers below. So, what I'm imagining is these temp towers will make sure that you can get connected.

I think ATT is a tier 1 network, so your connection to whatever data center will probably get bonded directly to whatever ATT datacenter which has the fastest response (ping) to the content your connecting to...love to see a traceroute for comparison.

Re: Inside AT&T’s 83 GB/hour mobile cell tower

#27

Post by NickNameNick »

tomflack wrote: post #19
BadCRC wrote: post #14

what do the AT&T vans connect to? I assume that there is no landline available for them to hook into, so how are they providing service? my guess is satellites or communicating with other cell towers but the latter seems counterproductive as it would push a high load to a different cell tower. but if they used satellites, wouldn't there by high latency and bandwidth limits?

I've seen line-of-sight microwave used for similar needs, but not in built up areas. Edit: clicking through and actually reading the link, the picture clearly depicts Microwave backhaul. Probably to a site in the vicinity they have a nice big land-based pipe.

The article describes the microwave link as 'additional capacity', so I'm guessing that they had another (primary?) connection, but needed more throughput.

When the rugby world cup was running last year I saw a number of temporary cell sites, which had plastic ducting and fibre optics running ~50-200m to existing telecoms cabinets or cell sites.

I imagine that At&t is doing something similar, hooking into an existing cable at the nearest roadside cabinet or traditional cell site.

Re: Inside AT&T’s 83 GB/hour mobile cell tower

#28

Post by w1ntermute »

rgbrenner wrote: post #3

So light on details.. could have mistaken it for a press release. And more amazing, they managed to get some of that wrong. In their graphic, they mislabeled the mobile command post as H, and G in the key... and "AT&T’s network is about 80% iPhones" then link to an article about _smartphone_ sales in _Q4 of 2012_

> could have mistaken it for a press release

I tend to avoid articles on any 3rd party sites with the word "Mac" or "Apple" in their domain names for this exact reason. The effects of the RDF are just too transparent.

Re: Inside AT&T’s 83 GB/hour mobile cell tower

#29

Post by hncommenter13 »

I ran a mobile gaming conference for about 250 people in a major city back when AT&T was the only game in town for the iPhone (~2009). Without calling us or us reaching out to them, AT&T contacted the venue and installed a micro-cell--free of charge--to ensure good coverage throughout the day.

Say what you want about the network or the company, but I was impressed. (It probably didn't hurt that we had some folks from Apple on the attendee list.)

Re: Inside AT&T’s 83 GB/hour mobile cell tower

#30

Post by Matsta »

I've been researching something similar for a startup idea for a while now.

There still a couple of problems that still haven't been addressed (or just aren't included in this article)

1. 1 Cell site isn't enough to cover a densely populated area. Although this is running on 850mhz which is much lower than wifi at 2.4ghz, multiple cell sites are usually better than 1 big one. If their peak is only 189mbps, then it should be fine using cat6 cable, however your limited when for range as you will run in trouble if you run cable over 100m without a repeater or booster. The other option is to use fibre, which is rather expensive but it wouldn't be that bad for AT&T considering their size.

2. Limited to the network beyond the cell towers.

This is coming from experience being at large festivals like Coachella, but although you can get signal on your phone most of the time, sms is virtually useless since your txt's are delayed by 4-5 hours. You can make a call after about trying 10 times, but because of the noise, you can never hear what the other person is saying and vice versa. So unless they are running a local relay for text's and transferring calls, their network servers are the ones that need beefing up rather than the towers themselves.

Now I'm guessing people are going to be using data more than anything, but in the past I've found 2g to be much more reliable (3g flatout did not work at the last festival, Big Day Out I was at). We found that Whatsapp became the most reliable way to communicate between our friends as your messages wouldn't get delayed for hours.

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