Tower planning

How do you plan to deploy new towers or sites. Is it true that the higher the better? I’ve been contemplating this idea:

As our customer base grows on an average of 70 to 100 every month, out towers are little by little requiring more bandwidth. Some of our Advantage APs are pretty close to fully reach the 14 Mbps as traffic peaks during the day. We are thinking about adding clusters of APs on different bands and also installing new towers to offload existing ones. We also have a problem with looks. Many people have rejected our service because they live on these expensives houses and they don’t like to have a 30 ft mast with guy wires on top of their roof. Almost everybody will accept a DirectTV like installation, but not a mast on their rooftop. So on trying to figure out how to solve all of these problems I toughth I would ask around in this helpful community of canopy operators. How about, instead of building tall, long reaching tower, building short, 120 to 150 ft monopoles (Cellular style), in a configuration (downtilt), aimed to cover 4 to 5 miles at the most, spread around a highly populated area? In my opinion this would solve all my problems. There would be enough of them, so that bandwidth wouldn’t be an issue as customers are spread around more towers and it would solve the “look” problem as no customer would be further than 4 or 5 miles from this location. We currently have only one tower that’s about 150 ft and this theory apllies very well to it. Everybody on that tower has been installed with side mounted reflectors or very short poles w/o guy wires as long as they were inside the 4 to 5 miles circle. I would love to hear your comments on this as it would help us a lot. I also have the thought in the back of my mind that this idea could have work before but it’s past its time as mesh network would do similar with better results. But, how about the cost of my idea besides the cost of mesh?

Thank you ahead of time for your comments

sivanisky,

You have a good business. My network is about 300 SM. I have been in the business for 8 years and I can’t grow more because of regulations, Interference,or just afraid of the Interference consequences. If I can just get a license frequency, things would change.

About the towers, I try not to use them. I only have 4 of 300 installations with 30 and 40 feet of tower. In the USA, getting the permits from City Hall, and FCC are hard. Down here ( Caribbean, Dominican Republic) anyone can install a 200 feet high radio tower. No questions asked, Nothing.

I use sites on mountains to repeat the signals. Problem using them are higher noise. The good part about them is almost no pole at the client.

Do you have a topo map?
Are you in a rural or urban zone, Buildings, Trees?
Do you, or someone in the company know how to use AutoCad or any topo radiation software like RadioSoft?
What’s the location, or how is the topography of the terrain?
What’s the probability that someone else could sell the same service?

We are in an area of south texas that is completely flat. It is LOS wireless heaven. We battled to mantain our little 80 customers base for years until our parent company decided to help us some more and we started to get more help from them. you know, tools, money, towers, money, money, money…anyways, we took the oportunity and we grew the business. With all the cost of building towers and all the equipment (trucks, tools) we are still depending on them to fund us but we expect to have some positive results (we are loosing money) by January of 2007. We currently have deployed 630 SMs and a bunch of other wireless customers on this other licensed 700 Mhz system. total we count about 1600 customers. Let me tell you that licensed is not necesarily better. For us canopy it’s benn much more reliable than the licensed band. We are kind of close to the mexico border and ilegal TV stations transmitting from Mexico mess us up all the time. We have at least 3 to 4 outages a month due to interference in the 700 Mhz band. In the other hand we don’t remember when it was the last time we had to battle interference with canopy. Even some TV station from within the US interfere with us from time to time.

Sorry, forgot to add, it is a mixed urban/rural. Lots of threes, not very tall, but 50% of the time they are just tall enough that you have to use poles and guy wires

Looks like a very good company.

Any tall buildings?

700 MHz is great, :frowning: , Maybe someday Mexico will stop transmitting TV signal in 700 MHz band.

The propagation and permitted power levels in the 900 MHz is better than any other frequency, ie 2.4, 2.7, 3.5, 5.2, 5.8. But I think the band will be saturated shortly. Why not deploy heavy on 900 MHz, and Install AP ever 1.5 KM with out any tower?

Maybe Motorola could implement some WiMax technology have some 1MHz channel spacing. That would help you in your case.

In rural location, heck, get the permit and install towers as high as they let you, Or rent some space on the new 2,000 feet towers. (Cooming soon to your area).

Very few tall building. Can count them with one hand and we are already on top of all of them. We are the only ones. There is few other wireless providers but they are strugling to stay in business.

Make sure you have a good contract from the building owner, stating that you will be the only ones allow to use 902-928, 2,400 - 2496, 5,100 - 5850 MHz on the ruff top of the building.

A new one comes, do the same. :slight_smile: