How close to a 4G tower is good?

I've got no idea other than wandering around with a compatible G4 phone or other device that shows you bars. Small dead spots can show up, for example.

BTW, watch that "unlimited" thing. US providers have been backing off that since it was first introduced. The current thing is to have fine print stating that only the first X Gb is at full speed (4G or LTE), after that they throttle you back to the speeds of earlier technology. Still, technically, unlimited, at least in frustration.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Well, if you had a spectrum analyzer and a calibrated antenna, you could probably measure the signal strength without borrowing a smartphone. Reliability can be calculated from the estimated fade margin over your path at a given speed and BER (bit error rate). Formulas and examples on request.

However, I think it would probably be best if you test your speed with a phone that's at least similar to what you plan to purchase. If the local phone store is sufficiently interested in selling you a phone, you might be able to convince one of the employees to meet you at your house and run a quick test on

If you want to burn lots of my time and effort, I can produce a coverage map for the cell site, showing approximate field strength levels at various points. I've done that for various cellular defense projects, when the local residents failed to appreciate a big tower in their back yards. For example: Download both of these files to a common directory: and double click on the KML file. Google Earth should appear using the JPG file as an overlay. Step on the middle mouse button and hold it down while moving the mouse. Note that the above analysis was for RF exposure, not really for coverage and performance.

The software is free: and with some little effort, you could probably learn to do it yourself. From the field strength, I can calculate how much signal your unspecified smartphone will receive from your unspecified cellular service provider on an unspecified frequency at your unspecified location. Details, such as specifics and numbers, are always helpful.

For more specific abuse, I suggest you post your question, this time adding the name of the cellular service provider and the proposed smartphone, on Howard Forums:

Cutting the phone line is harder than it looks...as I recently found out.

Signal strength is only part of the problem. Multipath can kill your ability to go fast. What's acceptable for a phone conversation ain't necessarily enough for data. The number of bars is a guide, but can give you a false sense of security.

Then there's the congestion issue at peak use times of day.

You really need to find a way to test the actual system at different times of the day.

I switched to Clear Wi-Max. You can access their site without service. Anything that goes to the web, read most, stuff doesn't work, but they did have some large firmware upgrade files that I could download to assess usability for data. They are no-contract, money back, so was simple to get set up.

I have foil-backed insulation and lo-E windows, so I got five bars in the attic, but three in the same place a foot lower inside. Signal strength, as indicated by the bars varies widely in different inside locations. Fortunately, the place I want to put it coincides with good signal if I turn it 35 degrees. Something as simple as a spouse who insists on things being neatly aligned on the shelf can undermine your data rate.

The latest wifi version of the Clear modem would work in the attic, but summer attic temperatures are not conducive to long life.

Next, I had to put back the phone. I bought an Obi box with google-talk and later a magic jack. Sound quality is excellent on my end, but the other end complains of dropouts and missed words. I think that's the result of trying to use wireless internet. Happens on both devices. Never found a solution, so I just live with it. I don't use the phone much anyway.

I use cordless phones around the house. The combination of wi-max and my dual-band wi-fi absolutely wiped out my 2.4GHz cordless phone. 5.8GHz. wasn't much better. Had to get a Dect 6.0 phone to get a different frequency band.

I opted to add a free garage sale flip phone and page plus at $40/year for a backup. Haven't used it yet.

Depending on where you are, Clear is probably not an option, but the issues are likely to be the same. Around here, Clear was the ONLY wireless option that gave me unlimited data at FULL speed. All of the more expensive smart phone plans specifically FORBID tethering in their terms of service. Check that carefully before you jump. You might be able to do it, but you might get a nasty surprise when they catch you.

The devil is in the details. It's not nearly as simple as it appears in the ad.

T-Mobile's data plan explicitly allows tethering and I think it's expensive enough ($60/month), however it's not unlimited (2G per month).

Their network is also a bit spottier than AT&Ts AFAIUI.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

On Wednesday, August 21, 2013 6:21:19 PM UTC-4, Dave, I can't do that wrote :

ore buying a smart phone? I don't know anyone with a smart phone to come wa nder around and see.

You may not need a smartphone. Many cell phones, even the dumb ones, have a test mode where you can view t he downlink signal strength in dBm (tower to handset). The higher the numb er the better, so -85 dBm would be far preferable to -105 dBm, etc..

I'm assuming the 4G will be at least WCDMA or LTE, in which case Ec/No rati o is more meaningful than just the raw number of bars displayed. In the ab sence of noise, modern networks can easily hang on to your call well below

-120 dBm without dropping you (due to uplink synch loss).

Google your existing phone and see if it has a test mode.

Also, many if not most cell towers use at least some degree of antenna elec trical or mechanical downtilt. This is mostly done for capacity reasons - to avoid one cell from covering too much area overlapping adjacent cells ( often resulting in "pilot pollution", again, just Google it). If you're ho me is in-close, the degree of antenna downtilt should work in your favor. Of course, even without the tower, you probably still have service since 4G handsets "talk" to more than one tower at a time anyway. That said, the n earest tower typically offers the best data rates.

On a sunny day (Wed, 21 Aug 2013 15:21:19 -0700 (PDT)) it happened "Dave, I can't do that" wrote in :

I am not sure it is a good idea to 'totally get rid of the landline'. I now have both, and wireless is unreliable. My 'landline' is cable and they recently doubled the speed (for free). Also they activated the second WiFi channel in my cable modem so that it functions as a hotspot for others. Deal is: If I leave mine on, then I can use the millions of other ones they have done it to, all over the country, so free WiFi everywhere. I have not tested elsewhere yet, it is a new thing, just activated a week ago, but if it really works I can get rid of mobile phone subscription altogether.

It is a clever move by the cable company.... Did not even know my cable modem had a second WiFi channel. Some measurements showed a third one (I am curious) with MAC 00:00:00:00....

Anyways LTE is coming for phones here, so I would have to buy YET AN OTHER PHONE to even use that, With this WiFi thing I am OK at reasonable speeds.

And, if you ever wanted to run a server (a logical thing to do), you will like the landline a lot.

The price for the landline should be noise compared to $90/month for 4G. Unless you have a pressing need for 4G waiting until they roll it out to a decent number of places might be wiser. I have been pleasantly surprised that 3G services now actually work where I live in the middle of nowhere - which is a handy backup for when fixed line gets snapped.

But I would hate to rely entirely on 4G only since the network coverage is still quite immature away from major cities.

It probably will be fine but wouldn't 3G offer a fast enough connection in many more places for a lot lower contract price. Why do you want 4G?

Thanks to everyone for the detailed explanations. Very much appreciated.

We are out in the boonies so there may be less "down-tilt" in favor of dist ance.

The main reason we want to be rid of the land line is that it is only used for DSL and we pay almost 90-bucks a month for just that. That's what you g et when there is only one land-line phone company servicing the area. That' s the minimum package to get DSL and there is no Cable out here. Hughes Sat ellite et al was way too spotty, sometimes slow and expensive, so we were e xcited at the prospect of 4G in our back yard, well almost backyard.

As to which flavor of 4G, I was not aware there were others, :) but that wi ll remain to be seen. I have talked to the cell phone people but did not ge t much info until they activate the 4G. By then, I guess, it will be try it and see.

Not having any form of cell Data out here before, no one has smart phones -

- yet. Maybe I can rent one for a week and try.

Thanks for the comment on tethering, but I was aware of that one after read ing all the fine print in walmart for the prepaid smart phones. I did notic e that a few cell companies do allow tethering. I would make that a stipula tion.

I am guessing that some (most?) of the major companies will buy into this t ower to extend their coverage so hopefully, we will have a choice of compan ies and deals.

I discovered that win8 shows an approximate amount of data and will monitor that for a week or a month and get an idea of normal bandwidth use. That w ill allow me to see if throttling would be a problem.

Again, thanks for all the helpful replies.

Dave

Exede (Wild Blue) Ka band satellite is MUCH better than Hughes on Ku band. Performance on a friends satellite internet feed. The latency isn't as good as cable or DSL, but it's good enough.

The different tiers all have the same speeds, but vary in the monthly download quota. Basically: $50/month 10 GBytes/month $80/month 15 GBytes/month $130/month 25 GBytes/month Add $10/month for equipment lease.

They also have telephony, although you could roll your own with a SIP phone;

(I'm not employed by Exede, Wild Blue, or Viasat. I'm not even a customer).

Terrain analysis is only as good as the DEM. For most of the US, that is only 1/3 arcsecond. Terrain analysis is indicative of something, but not foolproof. Plus there is the learning curve for the software. Granted Radio Mobile is dumbed down a lot from other terrain analysis programs.

BTW, spat-hd! is a better program if you can handle compiling linux code. Radio Mobile has a limited grid size.

Use a bit of caution when buying a LTE phone. Nobody makes a LTE world phone. I'm using a Smapdragon S4 plus with Paratek tuner in my phone, yet I can only do quadband LTE. A lot of phones only handle 3 LTE bands. The iphone 5 for example. If you could stomach a windows phone, Nokia has Pentaband LTE.

There are ways to run a sever without a static IP, but I suspect the wireless provider would filter all attempts at someone doing a server on their network.

The SRTM maps are not that good. There's SRTM3, which has about 3 arc seconds of resolution or about 90 meters, and SRTM1, which does 1 arc second or about 30 meters. The 2nd version of both includes some smoothing, coastline corrections, and manual corrections to get rid of oddities and glitches that plagued the first version.

I shouldn't really complain about free software, but the organization, terminology, and menu structure of Radio-Mobile sucks. It's one of the few programs that not only had to read the instructions, but also the tutorials, demos, videos, blogs, wikis, and hints scattered all over the web in order to get a clue on how to use it. Most software is fairly intuitive, but not Radio-Mobile.

Yeah, that's a problem with big maps. Even with at an angular resolution of 0.1 degrees (max for Radio-Mobile), it gets fairly chunky near the map edges. Fortunately, that only happens when I'm trying to plot huge areas, like the entire SF and Monterey Bay regions.

My problem with Radio-Mobile is that it only uses the Longley-Rice model. That's fine for narrow band signals, over "typical" terrain, but doesn't do so well with broadband signals and with the local forests. Of course, TVFool.com, RabbitEars.info and the FCC all use Longley-Rice for their plots, so I guess I'm stuck with it for now. Splat defaults to Longley-Rice but also includes ITWOM (Irregular Terrain With Obstructions v3), which I haven't tried yet. etc... Anyway, I've been asking for support of some other models in Radio Mobile for years. So far, nothing.

I beta-tested Splat-HD, but I only use it for line of sight analysis. You can do email with the author, but you might end up being asked to write the code.

My bad on the data resolution. The 1 arc second is everywhere. Some places in the US have 1/3 and 1/9 arc second. They can be downloaded here.

The USGS is one of the more "internet savvy" federal organizations.

I spent some time with the "seamless" website. Now there is 1/3 arc second coverage for CONUS. The 1/9th arc second area has been expanded. The bay area is covered now, even the metropolis of Prunedale.

I guess it is time to contact that splat author and see if he wants to do another upgrade.

I've paid for a satellite elevation study. One thing I can tell you is trees kind of mess them up. For land with a scattering of trees, they go back and tweak the DEM by correcting those areas. I don't know what they do for forested areas. Maybe subtract the average tree height.

BSP = Bell System Practices. I still have a collection dating back to the 1960's and 70's full of antique hardware. The problem with the other telcos is that they all try to emulate AT&T, even when AT&T is doing everything all wrong. Follow the leader into oblivion.

We recently had our office building wired by Comcast for business class internet and phones. There were 4 engineers and one sales personality involved. I believe (not sure) that there was one engineer each for:

1. Underground plant.
2. Aerial plant (removal).
3. Inside wiring.
4. Permits, planning, and sub-contractors. There were plenty of things that went wrong, most of which I attribute to the lack of communications between the various parties involved. For example, we ordered static IP's because we were running MS Exchange servers. Comcast gave us the wrong IP addresses.

However, one mistake went in our favor. Someone forgot to provision the router with a rate cap. For about 2 months, we were getting 85 mbit/sec down and 35 mbits/sec up. (The maximum is about 150 / 120 mbits/sec). It was great, but I guess someone was watching the traffic logs and spotted the mistake. Oh well.

Also, the other fun problem was that permits and planning didn't bother to notify the city that they had horizontal drilled under the roadway. One week after the system was up, it went down when the city dug up the road, and the cable, while replacing a sewer line.

Full Disclosure: I derive part of my income from cleaning up the mess left by AT&T and Comcast. However, no Verizon in the area.

On Sun, 1 Sep 2013 18:38:13 -0700 (PDT), mpm Gave us:

Snipped one of the most retarded posts I have seen in a while.

FYI, Usenet is 72 character line length, you retarded, INCONSIDERATE web interface dumbfuck!

They should be able to filter graphics and other content and let it go through on demand. I don't see any obstacle other than customizing the browser in their phone.

Not everybody can be as cool as you.