Canadian Towers in U.S.?

[mpallo]

I'm from Rochester, NY and was travelling on I-90 towards Cleveland near the Ripley, PA line over the weekend. I understand I am close to Ontario near the Lake. I did a network scan on my Nokia which looked like this:


--------SYSTEMS---------
T - Mobile
T-Mobile
ROGERS
Microcell
AT&T Wireless

Am I picking up the Fido & Rogers signals from across the Lake or is there towers/repeaters located on the U.S. side?

[ShoresGuy]

It came up with T-Mobile twice, mpallo?

[mpallo]

Yes...two instances of T-Mobile. I've been told it occurs when there is an overlap in coverage between two MNC's. In this case I think I was picking up former Aerial (Ohio) and Omnipoint (New York) towers.

[ShoresGuy]

Interesting..............[img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-smile.gif[/img]. I haven't been up to the NE part of the US but if the surrounding terrain of Lake Ontario is reasonably flat with no obstacles between the place where you were and the location of the Canadian towers/repeaters, then it's possible that you got a signal all the way from Canada itself. If I recall correctly, water tends to strengthen a weak signal (probably due to salt content, not sure about this though).

About how far was Ontario itself from where you were driving? I'm not familiar with that area of the US so I don't know the distance between the place you mentioned.

[img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-smile.gif[/img]

[mpallo]

I was not that far but I didn't think I was close enough to pick up a signal. You may be right about the water theory.

[Kenster]

[Article: Wireless Review]

In a perfect world, subscribers would live and work in a suburban environment with short buildings and few trees and use their phones only when they're outside. They don't. As a result, providing seamless, reliable coverage indoors and out means working around interference, metallic window tinting, water, foliage and concrete canyons, to name just a few of the gremlins that can put RF in the wrong places and keep it out of the right places.

Some of the biggest gremlins look the most benign. Water is one example. When a signal hits a lake or river, it can skip 30km or more. If it lands in another part of the network, results can include interference such as pilot pollution or dropped calls because the distant signal isn't strong enough to support a call.

Coastal highways can be especially problematic. In one case, a site covering a shoreline was beaming the signal perpendicular to the road.

"It was covering that road, but it was also shooting across the water and causing a tremendous amount of interference on the other side," said Neal Buren, Agilent Technologies product-planning engineer, wireless-service products. "The solution was to reorient the antennas so that they ran parallel with the shoreline. That brought down the interference on the opposite side."

The lesson: Too much coverage can cause more problems than too little. One example is pilot pollution, where too many strong signals confuse the phone and cause it to hand off repeatedly.

"In one case, we had 59 handoffs in a mile-and-a-quarter stretch of road," said Jed Dunbar, Transcept director of product management. "Every time you have a handoff, you take up overhead at the base station, (and that) saps capacity. So a high-capacity CDMA base station essentially becomes no better than an AMPS base station because it has all this overhead allocated to handoffs."

Another natural gremlin is foliage. In the summer, leaves can reduce coverage, and in winter, their absence can free signals to travel farther than they're supposed to. Even pine needles can become resonant at the right length.

"The site definitely needs to be above the treetops because it significantly increases the losses when you deploy below foliage," said Frederic Miran, Nortel Networks product-marketing advisor, GSM. "Even when you deploy fairly high above the treetops, you start having coverage breathing, where the coverage varies a bit during the season. It's not significant, but it can create some issues if you don't optimize for both seasons. You might not have the right neighbors declared at the right locations to perform the proper handovers, or you may see new interference created in this location."

URBAN RENEWAL Covering a dense-urban environment can be even more daunting. Buildings frequently shadow signals and increase multipath, so simply siting on top of the tallest buildings doesn't result in solid coverage on streets. One option is to site on shorter buildings and downtilt the antennas into the concrete canyons.

"We picked some of the buildings with lower rooftops and angled the antenna at one end of the canyon so it bounced off the next building and went down the street," said Gordon Davidson, Ericsson CDMA optimization services group senior manager for business development. "By doing that, we also provided in-building coverage. At the other end, we pointed another antenna at the opposite angle so these two were meshing together. They were able to take advantage of CDMA's multipath abilities."

Finding a suitable rooftop could become less of a challenge, thanks to lighter site equipment that doesn't require a location that can support a 2,000-pound cabinet. In Salt Lake City, for example, US West Wireless is using Ericsson gear that weighs about 78 pounds. "It's really easy to get on a rooftop now," said Joe Hannan, US West Wireless director of network planning and engineering.

Good coverage in concrete canyons doesn't always translate into good coverage inside adjacent buildings. One solution is to increase the power on nearby outdoor sites, but more often than not, that approach also increases interference and saps capacity in other parts of the network, to name just a few side effects.

"In CDMA, even if you're not creating a lot of interference, you may end up using up a lot of your forward-link capacity in order to penetrate the building," said Agilent's Buren. "You can't carry nearly as many calls on a particular sector as your network design would allow. (One carrier), in terms of the number of channel elements in the base station, had the ability to carry 20-some calls on a particular sector. But because they were using so much of the forward-link power to penetrate the building, they were carrying a maximum of six or seven calls at a time."

WHAT'S INSIDE COUNTS Concrete and granite aren't the only building materials that attenuate signals. Metallic window tinting, common in modern office buildings, can cut signals by as much as 60dB. But tinting actually can be an asset because it blocks outdoor signals, which might interfere with indoor signals or be too weak to support a call, and keeps indoor signals from leaking out and causing interference.

"It allows you more isolation between the inside and the outside and allows you to more reliably connect to the indoor cell," said Nortel's Miran.

One traditional drawback to in-building solutions is installation hassles such as getting landlord permission and running cables. But that appears to be changing. To use Transcept's PCS-over-cable solution, WirelessNorth will run cable through the Duluth, MN, skyway, a network of corridors that link downtown buildings to shield pedestrians from the elements.

"There are some key buildings that our marketing people want us to hit, so we're pulling it through the ceiling of the skyway to hit these buildings and using either two or four antennas off of each Cable Microcell Integrator (CMI) to improve in-building coverage," said Laura Slobotski, WirelessNorth engineering manager. As for landlords, "nobody has had any concerns. Our real-estate person would bring up the CMI box and show them the size and antennas and the cable. It's really non-intrusive."

Installations of fiber-optic and twisted-pair distributed-antenna systems also are getting faster, especially when they leverage existing infrastructure and know-how.

"The advantage is you don't need traditional installers," said Ashraf Abdu, Nortel Networks product-marketing advisor, GSM. "You can use installers that are used to installing LAN infrastructure. That reduces the cost because those types of infrastructures are less expensive because they're supported by a broader technology. If the building is already wired for fiber, it's usually a couple of days to wire it up as long as you have a good idea of where you want to put the antennas."

Costs also are falling. Take Radio Frequency Systems' (RFS') MicroBDA.

"Somebody could probably get the antennas, cable and Micro- BDA for $5,000," said Andy Singer, director of marketing and technical services at RFS, a company created by the merger of Celwave and Cablewave. "It doesn't take that many calls or satisfied customers to justify $5,000 to get better coverage inside a small building."

[mpallo]

Very interesting!

[ZaphodB]

Originally posted by: mpallo
I'm from Rochester, NY and was travelling on I-90 towards Cleveland near the Ripley, PA line over the weekend. I understand I am close to Ontario near the Lake. I did a network scan on my Nokia which looked like this:


--------SYSTEMS---------
T - Mobile
T-Mobile
ROGERS
Microcell
AT&T Wireless

Am I picking up the Fido & Rogers signals from across the Lake or is there towers/repeaters located on the U.S. side?

They're never actually IN the United States (with the exception of inside the Canadian Embassy in Washington... yes, you heard right, you can pick up a Rogers AT&T signal inside the embassy)... but my experience is that entire towns in the United States are often covered with Canadian signals, and entire towns in Canada are covered with U.S. carrier signals.

I picked up a Cingular (GSM) signal as far as four kilometres into British Columbia (on 176 St, the truck crossing to Vancouver, if you're interested), and there are Fido signals covering the entire border town of Blaine, Washington... my old Cingular phone, having registered on Fido while I was up there, didn't pick up a Cingular signal until almost exit 270 on the southbound 5, about 5 km south of the border (there is a large tower on the duty-free shop building on the BC side of the truck crossing).

The same has happened to me crossing from Vermont (I-89) and New York (I-87) into Quebec, and in Michigan (there is great US coverage along the first part of the 401 from Detroit due to the, um, flatness), and in Minnesota and North Dakota headed to Manitoba.

As for across the water... wow... that's quite a piece, but salt water causes signals to skip, which is why there is so much maritime coverage in populated areas of the West Coast... aim an antenna out to sea and you've got at least 10 km of usable coverage.

Where you were, there is a peninsula of land jutting out from Ontario, the tip of which is about 30 km (18 mi) from the American shore of the lake. Since it is, in fact, quite flat, it being a lake and all, that you got Fido and Rogers signals doesn't surprise me.

[ShoresGuy]

Originally posted by: ZaphodB

They're never actually IN the United States (with the exception of inside the Canadian Embassy in Washington... yes, you heard right, you can pick up a Rogers AT&T signal inside the embassy)... but my experience is that entire towns in the United States are often covered with Canadian signals, and entire towns in Canada are covered with U.S. carrier signals.

I picked up a Cingular (GSM) signal as far as four kilometres into British Columbia (on 176 St, the truck crossing to Vancouver, if you're interested), and there are Fido signals covering the entire border town of Blaine, Washington... my old Cingular phone, having registered on Fido while I was up there, didn't pick up a Cingular signal until almost exit 270 on the southbound 5, about 5 km south of the border (there is a large tower on the duty-free shop building on the BC side of the truck crossing).

The same has happened to me crossing from Vermont (I-89) and New York (I-87) into Quebec, and in Michigan (there is great US coverage along the first part of the 401 from Detroit due to the, um, flatness), and in Minnesota and North Dakota headed to Manitoba.

As for across the water... wow... that's quite a piece, but salt water causes signals to skip, which is why there is so much maritime coverage in populated areas of the West Coast... aim an antenna out to sea and you've got at least 10 km of usable coverage.

Where you were, there is a peninsula of land jutting out from Ontario, the tip of which is about 30 km (18 mi) from the American shore of the lake. Since it is, in fact, quite flat, it being a lake and all, that you got Fido and Rogers signals doesn't surprise me.

Interesting info, Zaphod, I thought I was right with the water theory but I didn't recall it for sure. It sure explains why the marine radio works quite well on the Bay as well. I remember that several years ago when I was still into CB Radio, I used to pick up states like Hawaii, Texas, West Virginia and even Florida back in 1995/1996/1997 when the skip was very good. Those were the days lol.

It would be funny to go by the American embassy here in London and pick up a Cingular GSM signal from there lol.

[ceric20]

how do you do a network scan with your phone?

[mpallo]

On my Nokia's Menu:

Settings>Phone Settings>System Selection>Manual

[ceric20]

and it tells you names like verizon, t mobile and etc? thats cool i never heard of it before i wonder if you can do that on a motorola