Total Cell Towers and Cell Sites by Carrier
From an American Tower Presentation to RBC:Total number of cell sites per carrier:
Nextel: 20,000
Sprint: 25,000
Cingular: 44,000 (Other estimates show 50,000)
Verizon: 22,000
TMobile: 24,000
Alltel: 8,000 (I assume this is pre Western Wireless)
New Big 6 Total: 143,000
posted by Steel in the Air @ 2:06 PM
13 Comments:
I saw one story that said that there were no reports of any towers down. However, if previous hurricanes are any precursor- many sites don't have generators and there is no power so they are down. And for the ones that do have generators- they will or have run out of gas.
Furthermore, Sprint's switch was down. In Charley- we had very few towers come down- and actually had passable service during the hurricane itself. It was afterwards when power went out and techs could not access the site that service sucked. (So bad that some carriers who thrive on government service lost contracts because govt service personnel could not use their phones in an emergency)
check out http://www.wirelessestimator.com/ for more details on the damage to towers.
Dave,
I did not know the answer- so I asked an associate.
His words:
"Verizon has a sharing arrangement with Alltel so together they claim the largest network (prior to AT&T/Cingular merger)
I am having trouble wit the Sprint number here, and the combined Nextel/Sprint numbers are way out of whack.
CDMA and GSM and the same for TDMA, and all other modulation schemes do not really affect coverage. But that statement alone is not complete as there are capacity issues. Each can utilize only so many channels of the overall spectrum. As the carrier selects the modulation scheme each takes space from another. Depending on which is the "flavor of the month" (right now GSM). Right now Cingular/AT&T are running four different modulations so that impacts coverage, and it is actually 5 since all have to run analogue for a while."
Not sure if this answers the question. My thought is that perhaps the number of sites projected by ATC is simply off.
The issue is that even if this is the most updated info- (Which its not- its probably 6 months old) is that no one really knows how many towers there are. Absent the FCC ASRs- which are only required for 200' or more towers, there is no tracking. ATC's estimates are just that- an estimate based on what they could gather from the annual statements.
I would check with www.pcia.com on the average number of T1's. My personal guess (and its totally a guess- barely even a good one) is that it hovers right around 1.8 or so.
Unfortunately, not much. The answer depends upon whether your county has zoning regulations regarding towers. If they do, then your cousin should check with the county planning department to confirm that the tower meets those regulations and whether or not he/she can appeal the decision. Please be aware that this would be a potentially expensive undertaking- the tower company will fight back.
If there are no zoning regulations, then there is not much you can do.
Is there any way to find the locations for tmobile towers (or any other carrier's towers for that matter) by zip code or some other geographical metric?
I live in a mountaneous area and am trying to see which carriers have towers close to my home.
Regarding the number of cell sites in any one region for each carrier, I am not aware of a way of finding that information.
Regarding finding a wireless carrier's cell sites in one specific area, there are some free tools like www.cellreception.com that show the FCC registered towers- but that is a small subset of the actual number of cell sites. The FCC does not require all towers to be registered. Furthermore, the towers are listed by owner and the owner may not be a wireless carrier. To make matters worse, multiple carriers can use one tower or a structure that is not even listed with the FCC database. So in essence, there is no publicly available database of individual cell site locations.
Is it heard of cell towers leasing for 10K mo? RR
Yes- there are towers that lease for $10K a month- but it is extremely rare.
Hello! I am attempting to give myself a crash course in the dynamics of the cell tower market. I had a few high level questions:
-Are the words "cell site" and "cell tower" synonymous?
For example, when I see there are an estimated 196,000 cell sites in the US, does this mean there are 196,000 actual tower structures? I saw a report that then said "Sprint Nextel has over 61,000 cell sites, AT&T has over 55,000.. etc" In these cases, I'm assuming this means these companies have antennas, etc, at that number of sites. (Not that they actually OWN that many number of towers.)
-And is there any way to guage how many towers the carriers actually own? I've read reports that they are trying to decrease their PP&E and sell off these assets.
Any insights into these two questions would be helpful!
Thank you,
L
The term cell site and cell tower are not synonymous. A cell site is a singular location for the carrier's equipment and antennae. It can be located on a cell tower, a building, or a water tower. A cell tower is simply the structure upon which the cell site is located. Multiple cell sites on a single tower are called collocations.
The carriers are trying to sell their tower assets. TMobile is currently in the final stages of bidding on theirs. Figure that each carrier has between 10% and 20% of their total site count as towers that they own.
April 2007 I singed a contract with Alltell to put a tower on my property -they have kept the opion open - Alltell has done a site location on my property - they say it is the best site around here - the power, the road access are already there - do not need to do anything - just put it in -what has happend to the tower????
There is not much you can do to get Alltel to move forward. Unfortunately, the prospect might even be worse now that they move forward due to Alltel's merger with Verizon. They will have less need for new towers- and will definately be slowing down their construction until they figure out what they need and don't need.
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