T-Mobile adds 1.2 million!!!

The cell sites here in the west are a lot shorter. The heavy traffic/population out here prevents towers from covering a large area so that's one reason they are a lot shorter. Local zoning height restrictions is another. Towers usually aren't tall enough to handle more than 2 providers each here. In fact most carriers build their own sites rather than co-locate. Cingular/T-mobile often has to put up 2 or 3 towers in virtually the same place because of capacity. Sprint & Verizon don't have to do that.

 

Sounds like it's a lot different where you are. I hardly ever see a Sprint/Cingular/T-Mobile co-location.

 

Not here in rural Nor Cal Larry, many towers are very tall, sometimes over 100 feet. I see them up here in Lake and Mendocino County, all across Siskiyou, Shasta, Trinity and Lassen Counties, and several very tall towers in the valley between Williams and Redding. Here in my area, many towers have to be tall and up on hills and mountains out of neccessity, in the valley, with the flat terrain and rural communities, signals can travel a long ways.

 

I still get DROP Calls on My CDMA phone, Why?

 

From what I can tell, VZW's low ARPU is partly caused by a large base of legacy low-end "safety" customers (Cingular and most other "all or mostly 850" carriers have somewhat of the same issue) and mostly by VZW's relatively weak phone-based data services. (Among other things, VZW is the only one of the Big Six carriers still using CSD and not packet data for WAP, VZW is constantly criticized for apparently having some sort of vendetta against Bluetooth, and people utterly detest Get It Now. IMO, even Cingular has improved dramatically on the data side while VZW has sat on its hands doing very little with data and continuing to sell coverage, coverage, coverage.)

IMO, big improvement to VZW ARPU will come only when they get more competitive with phone-based data.

-SC

 

I'd say zoning laws are a big reason, if not the reason. My county, after getting complaints about the number of towers requested (I live in a combination suburban/rural county of a bit over 200,000) decided to persuade carriers to collocate and build fewer, taller, towers. Most of the newer ones are 140+ feet high, with room for 4-6 carriers. In general, most towers have 2-4 carriers on them here. The towers companies (American Tower, SpectraSite, Crown Castle) are big here. Also, in the more urban areas like Tysons Corner with 8-20 story office buildings, the companies place cell sites on them too.

 

Here's a tower near me - maybe a bit extreme, but along a highway in my county they put up 5 or 6 towers and that's it - all owned by a leasing company

 

Yeah that's a lot different than what they look like here. In fact most new cell sites are not in tower form at all. They're usually disguised on a rooftop with fiberglass paraphets that completly hide the antennas. Another common installation is in the form of a church cross/steeple. There's even a lot of micro cells that are attached right on to exsisting utility poles. Most cities/counties here in So. Cal won't approve towers anymore unless they are very well dsiguised and comform to the height limits (usually 60-70 feet is max.).

 

There's a small hill (well, it's more like a pitchers mound) right on the side of I-5 in the valley between Williams and Red Bluff Larry where there are 7 or 8 towers exactly like that and that big, all together in a bunch. They have everything on them, including cell panels, and radio, tv and microwave antennas, I'll try to take a pic of it when we go over to Chico next week for a couple of days (along with the TONS of train pics I always take on the busy UP and BNSF mainlines! ). On Hwy.99 as well as 70 between Chico, Marysville and Oroville, there are several big towers like that, with no apparent attempt to disguise them. Here in Mendocino County, the most they do to disguise towers is put them in a stand of trees (and there's a ton of those, this area is covered with Oaks, Madrone, Manzanita, Pine, Fir and Redwoods), co-locating seems to be big up here, Edge has colocated with the city of Ukiah (they have police, public safety as well as Edge Wireless panels on the site at city hall) as well as the NWP RR in Willits, to name some I know of.