So, how much does it cost to put up a new wireless site these days? The carriers always like to throw around the $1 million number. I'm asking because VZW has a building permit with the city of Brookings, SD and the construction cost including building and tower is just over $100,000. A 1/10 of what VZW claims it costs to put up a new tower and the major reason they give for rarely improving their network in the midwest. Dan
Depends upon what type of tower. You have self-supports, monopoles, guyed-wired towers and so forth. If the tower is under 180', it doesn't require tower lightings according to FAA guidelines. I could see a short monopole or self-support tower w/o tower lights being about $100,000. But you also have to take into account that it probably does not including the thousands of dollars worth of cellular/pcs radio equipment that needs installing into the shelter/bay. Also the coax and antenna's. That alone can easily be near $100,000.
Those cost don't include the cell site equipment (base station), plus antennas, coax, mounts, equipment shelter, T-1(s) or microwave antennas, etc.
T-1's alone every month should be a ton of money per cellsite. Can anyone answer my quick question as to how many calls a T-1 can carry at the same time?
Depends upon which type of technology you're using (CDMA, GSM, TDMA, AMPS). Another aspect to look at is if the site is F1 only, or are there more carriers on this site?
So if there is T-Mobile, CircKet, and Cingular on the same site they share the same T-1's?? I thought that each carrier has their own...sorry if this might be a dumb question. Let's say we're talking about a CDMA site that only has one carrier on it and is 1x enabled.
Andy; No they don't share T-1's (and it's not a dumb question!). The number of T-1's a cell sites equipment use is based on the number of radios in that the equipment manufactures specifies based on traffic (phone calls or data calls). Example if a site has 3 sectors (antenna pointing 3 different directions) and has 3 radios per sector with some equipment vendors it would only need 1 T-1 but with others it might need 2 (like with a site that has heavy data use.) Hope this helps
As mentioned earlier, carriers from different companies don't share T1's. However, a carrier that deploys both analog and CDMA can share a T1 at each site. This is called a fractional T1 and is fairly common with rural carriers. An engineer may decide to split the T1, having channels (DS0's) 1-14 going to the CDMA BTS & channels 15-24 going to the Analog BTS. In case you weren't aware, a T1 has 24 channels or time slots. This is a cost saver, leasing only one T1 instead of two. Obviously this only works well if capacity issues are met with one T1. I would say your most basic CDMA BTS with one T1 & one carrier can occuppy approx 55 calls more or less. Lets also say it is an omni cell site (one radio).
Thanks to both of you for your information and help, and not calling me stupid I am very interesting in the way cellsites work but always get confused. What exactly is "one radio"? How many calls can be fit into one channel?(All those question are regarding CDMA). Also, here's a scenario I often encounter(with VZW CDMA): There is a very busy commercial area that has tons of traffic going through it, especially during rush hour. My phone usually idles on channel 384 and usually processes calls on 384. During rush hour, however, I often get bumped up during calls to channels such as 425, 466, 589 and others. What exactly does that mean? I know that if a cellsite temporarely reasigns you a channel it's for capacity reasons at the site, but how does that work? Also, if one T1 can carry approx 55 calls, I would think that most sites in Urban areas have more than 1 T1 line if I'm not misinterpreting this. Thanks so much for explaning this to me, guys!
What has already been written about T-1s and the various types of towers and hardware are all true from my experience. But other factors have a bigger impact on the overall cost. In addition to greatly varying rents and up-front payments, the biggest expense is professional services. The zoning process adds to the cost greatly because of the repeated testimony and office work of lawyers, and pro RF and civil engineers. Not to mention us "expert" site acquisition folk :wink: . Also, delays cost time. It is common for a site to take one half to 3+ years to get on the air. Sometimes, the expensive processes have to be re-done because of a zoning or court rejection. New candidate for the same "site". I could go on and on, but a median price would make more sense than an average. The rich, urban or sub-urban sites tend to cost much more than the rural sites all told. A new site in rural Wyoming might cost (in total) only 200,000, but a site in Cambridge MA might cost a whole lot more.
Ch 384 is known as F1 or the first carrier. But as time goes on and traffic increases engineers add more carriers (channels). So they add F2 (426) and so forth. One T1 can operate two carriers, but if the site is really loaded they usually bring in more T1's. If F1 is loaded down the BTS will move you to F2, etc.... As far as your first question, i would just be guessing to how many calls one channel can support. A radio is the transmitter/receiver of the frequency the carrier is broadcasting. It sends RF (radio frequency) out the antennas and also receives RF from the mobile's.
Some rough costs for a tower now being built in a rural area of Maryland with no local zoning regs: $100,000 for the access drive (had to be up to MD standards) $100,000 for the stormwater management ponds and trenches associated with the driveway. (MD standards again) 1 full year delay to go through all the plan reviews and revisions. Engineering and surveying costs were many times higher than expected due to the MD Stormwater Management regulations, reviews and revisions. The T-1 and power run costs were very high due to the distance of the tower from primary service. This one was above $350,000 without even including the costs of the tower, shelter, antennas or radios etc. And this was a "no zoning" site!
There was another post showing that Cingular finished the Indiana integration. In the news release Cingular stated they added 30 new towers in different parts on Indiana at a totoal cost of $90 Million.
Was the total tower cost that much or did that include network upgrades? I bet simple upgrades and adding capacity was included in that total.
Andy; it usually includes other cost like software upgrades to the MSC (switch), TCU/TRAU (Transcoder equipment)BSC (base station controllers) and BTS (base station or cell site equipment), along with additional radios & transport (T-1's, fiber, DS-3, etc.).
From the Cingular Press release. "Cingular Wireless has spent almost $90 million building more than 30 new cell sites throughout Indiana in 2005. This includes key sites in the following Indianapolis areas: - Geist - I-70 east of Shadeland and I-465 - Speedway - Irvington near East Washington and Ritter - I-465 Southeast Corner - Beech Grove
