Watrousville At&t Site

I drove by the tower today and I'm pretty sure Alcatel used microwave to backhaul this site and probably all other sites in Tuscola County. I'm pretty sure I saw microwave dishes in between the panels. A new pic of the tower showing these would be great

So, I'm not very familiar with how backhaul works exactly, but I was always under the impression that backhaul was done through the local wireline carrier (I think in that area, it's AT&T). Why would they use microwave backhaul instead of the traditional route?

On Edge copper backhaul was fine but with HSPA+/LTE you need microwave/fiber for backhaul to handle the speeds. Kinda like phone line vs cat6.

Caro doesn't even have U-Verse right? So that means it's probably all copper in the area and no fiber so microwave was the best choice for cost. Microwave can handle huge amounts of bandwidth though so no worries on that.

Caro's wireline carrier is CenturyLink. So, we will never have U-verse here, unless AT&T acquires CenturyLink. That area in Watrousville uses AT&T as the landline carrier (the cutoff with CenturyLink is just before Watrousville).

I believe the intermediate school district is laying down fiber throughout the county. Do you think they could use that?

Well Watrousville doesn't have U-Verse right?

No AT&T wouldn't do that. They'd only use their own equipment and connections for everything so they don't have to depend on someone else.

If you drive by that site soon look on the west side of the panels and look to see if you can see a microwave dish up there between them. I'm 99% sure I did yesterday and if there is I'm sure there's another one pointing towards Caro as well.

The tower here in Cass City has some microwave dishes on it but I'm not sure which ones are AT&T's. I should have took a picture before the tower upgrade to know for sure which ones they are.

With that tower in Watrousville being for AT&T only you'd know what the equipment looks like for sure.

Just took a walk by the Cass City tower today and there's new microwave dishes facing Caro and Bad Axe so eventually the whole thumb will have HSPA+/LTE.

Looks like everything in the thumb will be backhauled via microwave from Bad Axe to Cass City to Caro to Watrousville to Reese to Saginaw where there's AT&T fiber/backbone, they have U-verse there.

Sanilac County will probably be backhauled to Imlay City or maybe Port Huron since there is a new tower south of Sandusky that's probably HSPA+