Question, does the quality of service degrade if providers share towers? I heard AT&T uses other towers to increase its coverage so I was trying to figure out if that was a bad thing. Thanks.
Confused, No, sharing towers is a good thing. The only downside is that if everybody uses the same tower, and one carrier is bad at your house, they all should be about the same, given operating on the same (frequency) band. -Bill
I've heard that, when towers are shared, the callers who are subscriber's to the system that actually owns the tower have top priority. If you are on a call on a full tower and not top priority, your call will just be disconnected without warning to make room for the priority caller.
No, that is not true. The antenna assemblys and software are all individual. If you see a cell tower with 5 vertical sets of different antennas, then it will have 5 base buildings. One for each carrier. The only thing they share is the metal structure.
CDMA....this is off the subject, but what brand of amp do you have? I am looking to get one because I am traveling in an area that Alltel bought from CenturyTel and the towers are still spaced for Analog 3-watt phones (ozarks of Arkansas).....They will be fine when all of the digital is overlaid, but the analog sux! Brad
Question. If I am roaming on lets say T-Mobile, and all of a sudden all these T-Mobile customers make calls, will I get booted because I am with a different carrier? Same with Cingular. If all of us are on one tower and someone is talking roaming with us from TMobile or AT&T, will they get booted if that one Cingular customer that is needed to max out the tower comes on?
DemoMan, It's from (www.criterioncellular.com). It's digital/anolog/800/1900MHz. I just put it to a great test last weekend and it makes my Verizon V60i work every bit as good as my old bag phone in Northern Michigan, which is also a former CenturyTel area. GSM coverage is also very limited in this same area and the amp makes a big improvement for my digital phone.
I hesitate to spend that much money because I know that by years end they will have all of Northern Arkansas overlaid and my service should be fine....I'm sure there will still be a few bad spots but I can prob. live with it. In the end, I'll prob. still get one. Brad
No, you won't be booted off. All callers get the same priority no matter what carrier they belong to. Caller priority is a parameter set in the phone's software on TDMA, but on other systems this may be at the network level depending on the type of call, such as emergency calls. At the tower level, once your use of the voice channel is authorized as a regular user, there's no way to tell which carrier you belong to because you are simply using a voice channel just like the rest of the users. Authentication and billing are taken care of at a different location, not at the tower. The only time you may get booted off is if a person attempts a 911 call and the tower is full, so someone will get booted off. The FCC mandates that carriers make all efforts to ensure emergency calls go through, so emergency calls get top priority. Another time when you may be booted off is when you are driving and moving into a crowded zone and your phone attempts to handoff to a tower that is already full. Callers already on the tower cannot get booted off by an approaching user wanting to handoff to a tower that is at full capacity. In this case, the approaching phone will attempt to handoff to another neighboring tower even though signal is weaker but if all neighboring towers are full as well, then you'll eventually move too far away from the original tower and the call will drop.
Your amp that you speak of will give you no assistance in the CDMA world. There is a parameter set in the database in the OMCR that is called cell radius. This parameter is set in Km for call origination. A site or sector might be set to 5 Km and that will be as far away from the site that you can be to originate your call. This doesn't affect call that originate closer to the site and you drive outside the 5 Km range. You will be limited then to your uplink to the tower or downlink to your phone. I hope this clears up any confusion you might have. Granted this is on a Motorola CDMA system that I was describing. Not sure what is in your area.
I know that Motorola provides the switching equipment for Alltel so I assume this would hold true for their systems. The thing that confuses me is that the amp that is in question is made by a division of Motorola. Brad
