Anybody who lives in an urban or suburban area know that cell coverage is not the same everywhere. There are neighborhoods with great cell coverage, neighborhoods with so-so coverage, and neighborhood with little or no coverage. Nobody understands this better than first responders and city employees who work in all parts of a city.
This is all due to the physics of cell coverage. The FCC has purposefully restricted cell towers to low power levels in order to create discrete coverage areas or cells. This was done so that neighboring towers don’t interfere and cancel each other out. Coverage is also affected by the specific frequencies being used by cell carriers, with some of the higher frequencies used for 5G having shorter coverage distances. Another important factor that affects cell quality is the number of users in a neighborhood. Anybody who lives close to a busy road or a high school knows there are certain times of the day when coverage gets worse due to heavy cell usage.
The final factor that creates cellular deserts is the placement of cell sites. The big tall cell towers were located years ago to largely take cover highways – not where people live. This was done due to a compensation system where carriers got wealthy from carrying vehicle roaming traffic for other carrier networks. Cell towers have also often been forced to locate on taller hills or away from residential neighborhoods who didn’t want a giant unsightly tower in backyards. Unfortunately, cities are now largely stuck with the original cell tower configuration.
A lot of the poor coverage can be solved with the placement of additional small cell sites to fill in neighborhoods with poor coverage. You might recall five years ago when the carrier industry promised to build a million small cell sites. For various reasons that never happened. The primary reason came when carriers realized they weren’t going to make any incremental new revenues from 5G, and they lost interest in investing in cell site infrastructure.
The good news is there is a way for cities to tackle the cellular coverage issue. My consulting firm recently helped a city in a major urban area that knew it had poor cell coverage. Using various tools, we were able to fully map all of the important factors that measure cell phone call quality.
We were able to create separate coverage maps for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, which is important because every carrier has distinctly different coverage areas based on the specific cell sites and frequencies they are using. Probably the best result of this study was a map that showed the unfortunate neighborhoods where all three carriers have poor coverage. A map overlaying poor cell coverage and household incomes was also eye-opening.
There are a lot of consequences of poor cellular coverage. The national statistics show that about 11% of homes have no home broadband and must rely on cell phones as the only source of broadband. Folks who live in neighborhoods with weak cell coverage can’t use their cell phone indoors. First responders struggle in these communities. Delivery companies struggle to find addresses when they lose cell and GPS coverage. Folks who can’t afford home broadband and who live in cellular deserts have the worst of all worlds for connectivity and are stuck having to seek out public WiFi for connectivity.
We think cities will find a cellular mapping study to be invaluable. For the first time, they’ll be able to visualize cellular coverage in ways they can understand. Armed with coverage maps, cities can have conversations with carriers about addressing some of the worst coverage. A next logical step might be forming public-private partnership or economic development initiatives to help fund improved cell coverage. But none of that can be contemplated until a city knows the facts.
Love to see the maps to get a visual of the coverage issues
Dear Doug:
Great article!! Cellular tower site placement is a major factor in urban cellular coverage, definitely. Other major significant factors are the building materials used in the buildings.
Years ago, clients would complain that they could not make cellular calls from their desk in northern Virginia… I would ask, “How about a radio at your desk… does that work?” Often, clients would confirm that they can’t get a radio signal to their desk due to building interference. Metallic building materials, cement, and even the energy-saving reflective materials on the windows will all hamper radio or cell phone signals from getting inside.
Good luck.
I use this analogy with clients in regards to wifi.
WiFi is light. The walls are curtains, anything from a thin one that lets lots of diffuse light through to a blackout. If you want to read in the bedroom it’s best to put a lamp in the bedroom rather than put a 10,000W light bulb in the living room. WiFi is more forgiving but this is how it works.
It’s no different for mobile.
The cell companies just are not prepared ( or their profit margins aren’t) to deliver maximum speeds to maximum people with maximum coverage. The operational expense of this is enourmous.
I have some hope in tech like hotspot2.0 which some carriers utilize to allow cell offload in buildings or even busy public spaces, but this is a niche market right now and interest from cell companies seems to be somewhere between mild and completely disinterested.
More spectrum and more power output is definitely not the solution though, that’s the bright light in the living room in this analogy.
Cellular mapping as described here can be valuable for a city to know. But too many times, including the discussion above, first-responder cellular needs are NOT the same as those of the people who are attempting to get cell coverage to provide their utility internet needs indoors. Those people are poorly serviced by cell companies’ expensive cell plans when they can inevitably contract a cable plan or DSL plan for their household internet needs quite a bit cheaper than a cell plan, to say nothing of better speeds, less reliability during the daily rhythms, etc. Actual broadband availability statistics in cities far surpass outdoor cellular availability in many areas. The discussion above makes no distinction and laments the “tragedy” of many who can’t do their broadband with signals from a cell tower to their cell phone–not a good method of getting affordable utility data use in student or research or other data needs.
And BTW I know folks here don’t like to talk about, or dismiss as fantasy, cell phone and tower radiation exposure as a health concern. Good to remember that 5% of folks get real-time health effects (fatigue, foggy brain, tinnitus, and other early aging signs) from lengthy or intense exposures. Numerous high-quality studies have shown that 23 autoimmune conditions are fed over time by RF exposure. Another reason to rely at least on home routers for broadband, and better, for long, stable, fast connections, ethernet computer connection at home instead of signalling distant cell towers for extensive broadband use. Just saying.