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.