Why cell towers look funny

After all your c receives the signal from the cell tower, but where do these towers get their signals? Do they share data between themselves, or is there one tower at some headquarters that acts because the source of all of the content?

Most cell towers are mainly large wireless antennas connected to a router at your base via cables which can be connected to your carrier’s backbone network so you’ll be able to each make voice calls and hook up with the Web.

In the event you give it some thought, the setup is like a very large version of a Wi-Fi access point connected to an everyday router or modem, but that doesn’t suggest the towers never check with one another. The following time you drive past one in all them and look up, chances are you’ll see an antenna on the side of the tower that appears like a big bowl, dish, or drum. These are special microwave antennas liable for wireless backhaul transmission and are often pointed directly at one other tower in case there’s an issue with the wired network underground, and a few towers even use microwave antennas solely to transmit telephone traffic where it is required. especially if laying cables in a given area is simply too expensive or physically unimaginable. However the backhaul link simply connects the towers to the carrier, it doesn’t hook up with the phone, so where are the antennas that truly deliver the signal to the phone?

OK, look just a little longer on the cell tower and you will see the thinner, vertically oriented antennas, they’re what give your phone that sweet 4G or 5G. Unlike a typical wireless router antenna, which radiates the signal in a 360-degree radius, cellular antennas are often more directional and focus the signal in a single direction. While this may increasingly sound counterintuitive, because you obviously want the signal to propagate in all directions across the tower, it actually is sensible.

Having multiple directional antennas provides a stronger signal than simply one central omnidirectional antenna. A typical configuration is to rearrange them in a triangle, with each covering 120 degrees as an alternative of 360. On the side of every triangle you’ll be able to have three directional antennas, each covering a 40 degree space.

Chances are you’ll also see multiple layers of antennas stacked on the tower, but this often doesn’t include signal strength. As a substitute, it is common for various wireless carriers to share the tower with whoever gets there first, often taking the highest tier, a bit like siblings fighting for a bunk bed, but the actual ones know that the underside bunk is definitely the most effective.

And even though it could also be difficult to inform from the bottom, these antennas are sometimes tilted barely downwards and transmit at reduced power to scale back interference with neighboring towers. Ideally, that is calibrated in order that the signal reaches the top of where the following tower picks up, so you do not encounter any dead zones. How far does a cell signal travel, anyway? Well, if we’re talking a couple of 4G tower that has some open space around it, it could actually send a signal about 40 miles. Mid-band 5G, nonetheless, has a much shorter range, only about six miles at best, so as an alternative of very tall towers that attempt to send signals so far as possible, faster versions of 5G typically use shorter towers which can be relatively close together. sometimes much lower than a mile apart.

Some cellular network deployments even place antennas on the perimeters of buildings, eliminating the necessity for towers altogether, a phenomenon that might turn into more common as 5G networks proceed to roll out in dense urban areas.