Re: AT&T wireless

On Mar 4, 8:48�am, Desert Shadow <a51to...@aol.com> wrote:

On Mar 4, 1:12 am, "m...@sushi.com" <m...@sushi.com> wrote:

I see AT&T has a tower near Badger Peak. I don't know if it is
operational yet.


When it goes operational, what will be the range???


It could be operational right now. It's hard to tell from the FCC
website.

GSM has a 35km/22 mile limit due to timing considerations. I have
noticed that some of the AT&T towers along route 93 do not have sector
antennas in all directions. To convert that to English, the towers do
not transmit/receive in all directions uniformly. Thus it may work in
the metropolis of Alamo, but perhaps not elsewhere. If I had to guess,
assume all points along route 93 within 22 miles of those coordinates.
With luck, they have a sector facing the "gap" near Groom Lake Road
and the ET Highway. I haven't run line of sight analysis to see if
that area can be seen by the Badger cell site. I'd be happy if it just
worked on Tikaboo.

Depending on your phone, you can get software to identify the
individual cell sites and even sectors. Most cell sites have four
sectors, basically north, east, west, and south. Each site has a
unique number, then the sector itself is a "dash" of that number. I've
actually sniffed out the cell site data and got T-Mobile to add a
tower to their roaming. I haven't got them to add the AT&T sites yet
though.

http://www.cellumap.com/
They have an app that lets you sniff the tower and report back the
signal strength. However, there are not enough geeks out their to make
the map very useful.

http://f5bbutils.fairview5.com/signalloc/
This one is strictly Blackberry. CDMA towers can report back their
location with lat/long so it is good for locating the tower. GSM isn't
as fortunate since GSM towers do not report their location. The
software uses a Google database that crossreferences cell site numbers
with coordinates, but the database is pretty much crap. It is right
maybe 20% of the time.

The iphone was very very good to AT&T, and they didn't just pocket the
money. They have added enough towers at least in urban areas where the
service no longer sucks. Clearly they are trying to bridge the gap
between Vegas and Caliente with service that probably has little if
any return on investment. The bad thing is the iphone, being a great
gaming platform but a piece of shit phone, gave AT&T a bad reputation
for dropped calls. AT&T has been dumping their iphone 3GS stock. Of
all the iphones, that one sucks the least as far as phone use goes.