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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

#31

Post by ricardobeat »

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'll have a hard time finding a 50mbit stream on the internet...

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

#34

Post by jauer »

skyebook wrote: post #12
Game_Ender wrote: post #2

To convert to more normal units, that is about 189 Mbits/second. Which sounds a little less impressive considering the peak 4G speed is supposed to be 100 Mbit/second.

I thought 83 GB/hr seemed like not much capacity, and indeed that really isn't much. I've seen these units (and from other carriers as well, IIRC) before and figured they were bringing massive amounts of extra backhaul to spots with big events. I'm curious how these figures relate with what 'normal' towers have allocated. I've seen the rough 1 gbps figure before but don't know how accurate that is.

1Gbps assumes the tower has fiber. Since this was a temporary event we can assume they don't have fiber available, that and the article illustration shows a microwave backhaul.

Standard microwave backhaul in a licensed band typically tops out around 263Mbps as that's what you get with 256QAM in 40Mhz of spectrum.

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

#35

Post by parimm »

jauer wrote: post #34
skyebook wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought 83 GB/hr seemed like not much capacity, and indeed that really isn't much. I've seen these units (and from other carriers as well, IIRC) before and figured they were bringing massive amounts of extra backhaul to spots with big events. I'm curious how these figures relate with what 'normal' towers have allocated. I've seen the rough 1 gbps figure before but don't know how accurate that is.

1Gbps assumes the tower has fiber. Since this was a temporary event we can assume they don't have fiber available, that and the article illustration shows a microwave backhaul. Standard microwave backhaul in a licensed band typically tops out around 263Mbps as that's what you get with 256QAM in 40Mhz of spectrum.

A lot of operators are switching to higher frequency bands for their backhauls, I see a lot of Ubiquity airfibers popping up here in India. Airfibers are 800mbps full duplex

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

#36

Post by nwh »

ricardobeat wrote: post #31
delinka wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'll have a hard time finding a 50mbit stream on the internet...

Eh? I'm regularly pushing several times that out of my $5 VPS.

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

#37

Post by tumblen »

hncommenter13 wrote: post #29

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…

I help run a conference in Portland, OR and would love to look into this further.

Do you have any contacts still or any idea who I could get in touch with to get more information? Thanks!

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

#38

Post by jauer »

parimm wrote: post #35
jauer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1Gbps assumes the tower has fiber. Since this was a temporary event we can assume they don't have fiber available, that and the article illustration shows a microwave backhaul. Standard microwave backhaul in a licensed band typically tops out around 263Mbps as that's what you get with 256QAM in 40Mhz of spectrum.

A lot of operators are switching to higher frequency bands for their backhauls, I see a lot of Ubiquity airfibers popping up here in India. Airfibers are 800mbps full duplex

What kind of distances are they pushing them to?

AirFiber radios (I'm quite fond of mine) and other 24Ghz, 60Ghz, and 80Ghz radios have severe rain fade so you need to keep the distance down to one or two miles unless you feel lucky. Now find a cell tower in that distance with fiber and available mounting space. I suppose that isn't a big problem in a more densely populated area like southern California, but still more challenging than parking a 11Ghz dish on a rooftop somewhere within 14 mile or so.

From what I've heard most carrier interest in high frequency bands is for links going a few city blocks to connect micropops back to a area hub site. That kind of caution with fade margin is more in line of what I'd expect out of at&t or a similar provider.

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

#39

Post by packetslave »

Maven911 wrote: post #6

This is pretty surprising that AT&T engineers were the ones to design the antennas. It is usually vendors such as Nokia-Siemens, Alcaltel-Lucent or Ericsson that provide the equipment and that have the antenna/radio know-how while on the operator side the engineers there focus more on optimization and RF planning, rather then the design.

When you get to the level of "top 5 customer" (which AT&T almost assuredly is to whomever their equipment vendor is), the customer has quite a bit of input into the design of new products. Especially if the product is going to be sold primarily TO that huge customer.

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

#40

Post by duaneb »

w1ntermute wrote: post #28
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.

The only thing they're good for is reporting (the existence of) rumors.
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