Prior Notification by 5G Cell Tower Companies and Cities

In our fast-paced digital age, the demand for seamless connectivity is greater than ever before. To meet this demand, cell tower companies and cities are constantly expanding and upgrading their 5G cellular infrastructure. While the growth of cell towers and antennas is essential for improved connectivity, it's equally important that residents are informed and engaged in the process. In this article, we will explore the significance of notifying residents before adding a cell tower or a DAS antenna and how it contributes to a harmonious coexistence between technology and community.

How City Government Planning Can Improve Wireless Reception

City government planning plays a crucial role in improving wireless reception and ensuring reliable connectivity for residents and businesses. 

Here are several ways in which city government planning can contribute to better wireless reception:

How to Get Cell Reception on Your Property

We get hundreds of emails from property and landowners who are interested in leasing their land for a cell tower. Here are some ways we have discovered that are effective at getting a new cell tower.   These factors will come into play when carriers are considering your property:  distance to adjacent towers, population density, broadband providers in the area, customer density, city zoning laws & public safety.

If you are experiencing poor or no cell reception on your property, there are several steps you can take to improve the situation:

Hilton Head Island Cell Phone Reception

Reasons why Hilton Head suffers from poor coverage - Fake Cell Phone Pine Tree

Hilton Head Island, located in South Carolina, is a popular tourist destination known for its beaches, resorts, and golf courses. As with any location, cell phone reception on Hilton Head Island can vary depending on several factors. Here's some information regarding cell phone reception on the island:

Carrier Coverage: Hilton Head Island is served by major cellular service providers such as AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint (now part of T-Mobile). These providers typically offer coverage on the island, but the quality and extent of coverage may vary between carriers.

Urban Areas: In populated areas, such as residential neighborhoods, commercial centers, and popular tourist spots, you can generally expect good cell phone reception due to the presence of nearby cell towers and infrastructure.

Rural Areas: In more remote or less populated areas of the island, cell phone reception may be less reliable or weaker due to the distance from cell towers and potential geographic obstacles like trees or buildings. In some cases, specific carriers may have better coverage than others in rural areas.

Indoor Coverage: Cell phone reception indoors can be influenced by factors like building materials and signal penetration. In certain buildings or structures, you may experience weaker reception or dead zones. However, many establishments on Hilton Head Island, including hotels, resorts, and restaurants, often provide Wi-Fi connectivity that can help mitigate indoor coverage concerns.

Network Upgrades: Major cellular service providers are continuously working to expand and upgrade their networks, including the rollout of newer technologies like 5G. It's possible that network improvements may have occurred since my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, which could affect the current state of cell phone reception on Hilton Head Island.

To determine the specific cell phone reception in Hilton Head Island, it is recommended to check coverage maps provided by individual carriers or contact their customer service. They can provide more accurate and up-to-date information on coverage availability, signal strength, and potential service limitations in the areas you are interested in. Additionally, talking to locals or residents of the island might also provide insights into their experiences with cell phone reception.

Cell Coverage Hole Detection

Cell coverage hole detection refers to the process of identifying areas or locations with poor or no cellular network coverage. These coverage holes can result in dropped calls, slow data speeds, or complete loss of connectivity in certain areas.

Detecting cell coverage holes is essential for telecommunication companies and network operators as it helps them identify areas that need improvement in terms of network infrastructure and signal strength. By identifying these coverage gaps, network providers can take necessary actions to enhance coverage and improve the overall user experience.

Here are some common methods used for cell coverage hole detection:

Customer Feedback: Network operators often rely on customer complaints and feedback to identify areas with poor coverage. Customers may report dropped calls, weak signals, or data connectivity issues, which can help pinpoint potential coverage holes.

Drive Testing: Drive testing involves driving or traveling through various areas while monitoring signal strength, call quality, and data performance. Specialized equipment or mobile apps can be used to collect data on network performance, allowing operators to identify coverage gaps.

Signal Mapping: Signal mapping involves creating detailed coverage maps by measuring signal strength and quality at various locations. This can be done using specialized tools or crowdsourcing data from users through dedicated apps or services.

Network Performance Monitoring: Network operators continuously monitor network performance metrics, including signal strength, call drop rates, and data throughput. Anomalies or patterns indicating poor coverage can be detected through data analysis.

Site Surveys: Network operators may conduct physical site surveys in areas where coverage issues are reported or suspected. These surveys involve evaluating the signal strength and quality on-site, assessing the surrounding environment, and identifying potential obstacles or interference sources.

By utilizing these methods, network operators can gather valuable data and insights into areas of poor coverage, enabling them to plan and implement solutions such as adding new cell towers, adjusting antenna configurations, or deploying signal boosters to improve coverage in those areas.

Where is AT&T Expanding Mobile Coverage?

What does this really mean?  Are they filling coverage gaps in areas where they previously claimed to have coverage on their maps?  Are they expanding network capacity to provide better data?  Are they putting up new cell phone towers, adding wifi or allowing customers to finally use femtocells?

Every day carriers are sending out press releases claiming to expand their mobile coverage in areas throughout the state.  Here is a great example of a press release that is just a waste of time, resources, money and effort.  AT&T Expands Mobile Broadband Coverage in York County.  This press release is trying to convey a message to their customers explaining that they are adding six cell phone tower sites in the state of New York using High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA).  Do they really need to do a National press release explaining this to their 87 million customers and frustrated iPhone users?   This is a complete waste of time resources, money and just hype that is press release noise.

I have a suggestion for you AT&T.  Why don't you provide more transparency about where you are expanding coverage on a daily basis on a beautiful coverage map like we do on our dead zones coverage maps (below)?  Is it because you want the press and consumer advocacy groups like Deadcellzones.com to be as confused as possible when tracking your coverage claims and expansion?  Your press hype is "off the charts" and your lack of clarity of where you are expanding coverage is too confusing for any AT&T customer to understand the value of your daily regional press releases.

Providing a map of where you are expanding coverage would allow customers, employees, service providers, consumers groups and cell phone tower operators to understand where you have invested your resources to improve capacity and connectivity.   Your AT&T maps are completely worthless to the average consumer now that dropped calls and data congestion are more common than it was ten years ago in 2000.  Your senior management team needs to wake up and stop be paranoid about your competition because your lack of clarity and transparency is appalling.

Related Posts:

Where is Verizon Expanding Mobile Coverage?

Where is T-Mobile Expanding Coverage?

Where is MetroPCS Expanding Coverage?

AT&T Dropped Calls
Where is AT&T Fixing Outdoor Reception?
Identifying Dropped Call Locations
AT&T Service Plans and Coverage Review

How to Market Land to Tower Companies for New Towers

For every landowner with an open parcel of land that isn’t currently under use, a cell tower sounds like a great way to add value to the land and bring in an extra monthly income. If you know anyone who owns a cell tower lease, you’ve probably heard that the income is a welcome addition to their finances and that having a cell tower on the land turns out to be a lucrative investment. So how do you get a cell tower on your own plot of land? The answer to this question is not so clear, as cell tower leasing isn’t a simple matter of getting a tower company to build a tower and solicit a wireless company for tenancy. Here are some suggestions for marketing your land and increasing your chances of getting a tower built.

Getting a Cell Tower on Your Land
Before we get started, you should know that the chances of getting a new tower built on your land is close to 1%. That’s right: wireless carriers are very selective about where to build a new tower. A wireless company will select a parcel of land to build on based on a set of narrow criteria in the form of a “Search Ring.” A Search Ring is an area on a map chosen by company engineers as the best location to build a new tower. This area takes into account the topography of the land, gaps in wireless coverage, surrounding populations of customers, zoning conditions, distance to adjacent towers, and other characteristics that make a given stretch of land more desirable for cell tower placement.

Most cell tower lease owners are contacted by a company agent requesting usage of their land. So really if you think your land is a viable location for a cell site, the waiting game is the best chance you’ve got at being selected for a tower lease. However if your land exhibits a lot of the characteristics required by a wireless carrier to build a tower, there are certainly some things you can do to actively improve your chances.

Land Characteristics
If you decide to market your land, you should think about the characteristics your land demonstrates; otherwise you risk wasting your time. First of all, your land shouldn’t be less than a mile away from another cell tower. Due to the current demand of coverage and data usage, wireless companies are having towers built every mile or so. Are you surrounded by a dense population, or is your land located next to a major highway? These things help.

You should also see about getting into contact with your local zoning department and find out whether your land is even zoned for cell tower usage. Many jurisdictions don’t allow cell towers on residentially zoned plots, and they will have other regulatory requirements that your land should meet. One last question to ask yourself is this: is your land unique? If your land is perfect for a cell tower, is it the only area that can accept a cell tower in the region, or could a neighbor possibly accept a cell tower as well?

Market Your Property
If you think your land uniquely exhibits the characteristics required for a cell tower, there are some things you can do to make yourself more visible to wireless carriers, tower companies, and their agents. Put out a sign on your property or near the closest highway that advertises your availability for a cell site, along with a phone number you can be reached at. You can also attend any local zoning hearings for new cell tower construction and see if you can talk to a company agent or representative.

Contact Carriers and Tower Companies Directly
Carriers are not always easy to approach directly. Many of them have their own procedures for scouting out cell tower sites and they are solicited by landowners all of the time. However you can try getting through to major carriers like Verizon, T-Mobile, Cingular, and Sprint to see whether they are interested in scouting out new cell sites.

Tower companies tend to work with carriers when they build new towers. They can’t just build towers all over the country and hope to get paying tenants for the reason mentioned above: wireless carriers are very selective about where they lease cell towers because they have particular plans for their wireless networks. Plus if a cell tower is going to be built at all, many localities require a letter of intent from a licensed carrier that is going to be using the cell tower as part of the zoning regulations. However it doesn’t hurt to try to contact these companies for prospects, or to simply gather more information about your own region.

Get Professional Help
It also helps your chances if you network with professionals that are involved in the industry. There are various databases that tower companies and carriers set up to make their searches easier; getting your information into one of these databases can help. The closer you are to industry professionals, the more you’ll know about what is happening in your region and you’ll be positioned to take advantage of an opportunity if it comes your way.

There are also leasing acquisition and consultation companies, like Lease Advisors, which mediate between cell tower lease owners and other industry professionals. Companies like these offer negotiation services, enabling everyday people to more easily access and communicate with tower companies. Whatever path you choose, make sure you don’t go it alone. A professional helping hand is an invaluable asset, and the right lease agreement pays huge dividends. So be patient, be persistent, and be practical.

Grand Canyon Cell Phone Reception

The Grand Canyon is one of the most famous tourist destinations in the World. The canyon is a steep-sided gorge carved by the Colorado River in Arizona and sits nearby Lake Mead. It is largely contained within the Grand Canyon National Park one of the first national parks at receives more than 4.5 million visitors per year. This glass Skywalk opened in 2007 which allows visors to view the Canyon straight down thousands of feet.  

You will have to enjoy the view without being able to upload your favorite photos to Facebook and Twitter because cell phone reception in the canyon is almost non-existent. One would think with all these visitors and the "broadband stimulus" from the Obama Administration that this National park might be on the list to provide wireless reception for your phone safety?  Cell service from Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile is hard to find in the area.   We would appreciate your contribution to the Deadcellzones.com map of areas where you found reception in the park.  Click on the map below and type in Arizona or Grand Canyon Village, AZ to find the spot on the map to start adding complaints.

See also this map of Grand Canyon Cell Phone Coverage 

Great Smoky Mountains National Park Cell Reception

With more than 800 miles of protected trails the Great Smokey Mountains National Park is a natural wonder hosting nearly 10 million hikers and vacationers last year. Don't count on your phone working working in the area. Some have reported reception in the city of Townsend but anywhere toward a hill or mountain it was non-existant. In Wears Valley if you're high enough on a hill you might get a faint signal. What carrier works best in the area? Feedback is appreciated below and feel free to submit your dead zones directly on this map below after typing in Smokey Mountains National Park into the search menu. Some cell phones like Verizon make work better in the town areas, but do not work much at all inside the National Park. Do not depend on a cell phone if you may need 911 help.

Great Smokey Mountains Reported Cell Phone Dead Zones

Where is Verizon Expanding Network Coverage?

What does this really mean for customers?  Is Verizon filling coverage gaps in areas where they previously have claimed to have coverage on their maps?  Is Verizon Wireless expanding network capacity to provide better data for its' customers?  Are they putting up new cell phone towers, adding wifi or allowing customers to finally use femtocells?

Carriers are sending out noisy press releases claiming to expand their network coverage in areas throughout the US.  Here is a great example of a press release that is just a waste of time, resources, money and effort.  Verizon Wireless Expands Network Coverage in New Jersey With New Ramtown Cell Site.  This press release is trying to convey a message to their customers explaining that they are adding one new cell phone tower in the state of New Jersey.  Do they really need to do a National press release explaining this to their 92 million customers?   This is a complete waste of time resources, money and just hype that is press release noise.  Here is a suggestion of how to better use your resources and make your media department convey a message that is useful to more people.

I have a suggestion for you Verizon Wireless.  Why don't you provide more transparency about where you are expanding coverage on a daily basis on a beautiful coverage map like we do on our Verizon coverage map (below)?  Is it because you want to make it virtually impossible for media and consumer advocacy groups like Deadcellzones.com to audit your coverage claims and expansion progress?  Your press hype is ridiculous and your lack of clarity of where you are expanding coverage is too confusing for any Verizon customer to understand the value of your daily regional press releases.

Here is a suggestion.  Provide a map of where you are expanding coverage would allow customers, employees, service providers, consumer groups and cell phone tower operators to understand where you have invested your resources to improve capacity and connectivity.   Your Verizon coverage maps are completely worthless to the average consumer now that dropped calls and data congestion are more common than it was ten years ago in 2000.  Your senior management team needs to wake up and stop be paranoid about your competition because your lack of clarity and transparency is appalling.

Related Posts:
Where is AT&T Wireless Expanding Mobile Coverage?
Where is T-Mobile Expanding Coverage?

Where is MetroPCS Expanding Coverage?

Verizon's Arrogance Now Rules the Air
False Advertising of Cell Service Availability
Identifying Dropped Call Locations
Verizon Has 5X More Lies Than AT&T
Verizon Wireless Plans and Coverage Review

San Francisco Has the Worst AT&T Reception

San Francisco has been awarded with the worst AT&T reception in the US according to our users.  The map above shows where customers have complained about dropped calls, data congestion and poor voice quality consistently and its only getting worse.  Search the AT&T Deadcellzones.com Consumer Generated Coverage Map by typing in your zip code or city name.  Ironically, one of the worst locations for reception is the AT&T building where Twitter's headquarters is. This building has very dense population of iPhones in the City and with 1.7 million iPhone 4 units sold in the first three days its not going to get any better.

AT&T Executives partly blame the San Francisco City Council and zoning laws, claiming that they are limited by 4 foot antennas.  I am not sure if I believe this excuse because back-haul, signaling and switching seem to be the carriers biggest challenge in other areas of the US.  Can AT&T make densely populated iPhone areas work properly with larger antennas and more fiber back-haul similar to SXSW in Austin?   AT&T executives claim that if they could put 6 foot antennas onto buildings that could would be better for all customers.  I would like to see a beta test in Downtown San Francisco of using larger antennas to test and see if it improved coverage. If successful, the San Francisco City County could use our database of complaints to measure the amount of complaints in an area as documented proof.

Also, we also think every AT&T iPhone purchaser (especially San Francisco) will eventually get a free 3G femtocell similar to Softbank in Japan when more competition starts to challenge their Apple monopoly.  AT&T's MicroCell may not be the complete solution to fix the problem but they certainly should not be charging for data or the device considering all of the complaints we are hearing about on their network.   Consumer reports across the country seem to be a very mixed bag about the AT&T MicroCell the tech capital of the World, San Francisco seems to be suffering the most. Some say the MicroCell works, some say it doesn’t (even when the network is up) and some say it drops calls all of the time.  The common issue seems to be interference with the Macro network and control for the signal is increasingly becoming a challenge for customers who are installing the mini cell phone tower.  Will AT&T stick with Cisco Systems as the MicroCell manufacturer or will they look for alternative femtocells?  

Apparently, AT&T looks like they are being selective about who they are selling their new MicroCell to as well.  Apparently, TechCrunch is trying to purchase a MicroCell one but has been denied.  AT&T managed to sucker in two of the biggest names in San Francisco to purchase their new Microcell,  Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Salesforce's CEO Marc Benioff.  Both could be great advocates  had AT&T's network been prepared but apparently there were problems.  Benioff posted on his Facebook:  “Bought 2 AT&T MicroCells and apparaently installation won’t complete. Called AT&T. They said they are having a national MicroCell outage since Friday. It won’t work for 2 more days." Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook: “I got one and it seems to work pretty well." “Pretty well” isn’t exactly a rave review.

Related Stories:
Is Cell Reception Getting Worse?
Steve Jobs Cronies Hype: AT&T Getting Better
Why is AT&T's MicroCell Dropping Calls?
AT&T to Spend $1B on Free Femtocells
AT&T's Microcell U-Verse Set-Top Box
AT&T Home Cell Tower or MicroCell
AT&T Customers Will Soon Be Happy
AT&T Service Plans and Coverage Review

Outdoor Femtocells Enable Cheap Backhaul

There is a lot of “name pollution” in the wireless market, making it difficult to draw the line between picocell and femtocell. However, Public Wireless has invented a new economical approach to leveraging their experience in outdoor wireless to reduce back-haul costs for small cell sites.   Public Wireless is a new US company pioneering the use of Ubiquisys femtocells  – providing coverage and capacity where cell towers wouldn’t otherwise be viable.

This approach gives them at least as great as a macrocell, but much cheaper in backhaul terms. This is because it uses virtually any available IP transport layer (DSL/Cable/Fiber/Microwave) over existing fiber, coaxial or copper wires, rather than needing a newly constructed and/or dedicated connection to each and every site, such as with outdoor DAS installations.

There are three classes of these small cell sites which our products address:

1. Coverage, in areas where it’s not been possible to get zoning permission or planning permission to erect a cell tower from the local authority. They install a site unobtrusively within a short period of time that doesn’t require the same levels of special permission.

2. Macro Sector Off-load, in areas where there are hotspots of data congestion in a large cell area that adversely affect the rest of the coverage area. An example would be a student dormitory, which can be offloaded to a local hotspot. This allows the students much better throughput and the macrocell users get better service.

3. Data Capacity, providing a mesh of small cell sites which give enormous data capacity in urban areas at a higher backhaul density and a higher data throughput.

Read more at ThinkFemtocell.com