What's the average range of the Cell C 900 MHz signal?

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Terencek

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Anyone know roughly how far one of the new Cell C towers should be able to transmit? I understand the 900 MHz frequency they are using has a greater range than the other frequencies currently in use here -- but how far exactly should it reach.

In my own case, once they install the promised new tower in Rustenburg, might the data signal actually be usable for me about 30 km away as the crow flies?
 
Terencek said:
Anyone know roughly how far one of the new Cell C towers should be able to transmit? I understand the 900 MHz frequency they are using has a greater range than the other frequencies currently in use here -- but how far exactly should it reach.

In my own case, once they install the promised new tower in Rustenburg, might the data signal actually be usable for me about 30 km away as the crow flies?
Click to expand...

Difficult question. Highly dependent on the terrain and other factors. At best, you can look at a range of 3-4 km.
 
How far can you throw your handset?

On a serious note, though, the coverage area will "breathe" depending on the traffic volumes. On a good day you might get 7km and on a bad day 1km.

You will not get 30km due to the panning of the transmitter antennae.
 
You live very far out....you lucky to even have electricity and water. :-)
 
Actually , I DON'T have electricity and water! My home and office are entirely solar-powered, and water is pumped up from our mountain stream.... No telephone landlines either -- but fortunately there are a few cellphone towers in the vicinity. Unfortunately, my only usable Cell C signal is piggybacked off a Vodacom tower (Buffelspoort Dam, NWP) and it's pretty diabolical: low-end EDGE at best, painful GPRS on a bad day. Screamer did install a WiMax tower nearby, but they haven't been accepting new users for ages because of apparent overloading.

It will be interesting to see whether Cell C lives up to its promise of covering virtually all of SA (even my little piece of bush!?) by 2012, Mayan calendar predictions allowing....
 
On reflection the original answer to this query seems a bit problematic: that one would be lucky to get a range of 3 - 4 km from the tower.

Out on the road as we all know from long trips, we can go up to 50 km between towers yet still retain signal. Admittedly city landscapes, or extremely hilly terrain, will cut this significantly, but a range of only 4 km seems exceedingly conservative -- especially in light of the claim that the 900 MHz Cell C is using has a greater range than the original VC and MTN bands.

Anyone else have another take on this question of Cell C's tower range?
 
Terencek said:
On reflection the original answer to this query seems a bit problematic: that one would be lucky to get a range of 3 - 4 km from the tower.

Out on the road as we all know from long trips, we can go up to 50 km between towers yet still retain signal. Admittedly city landscapes, or extremely hilly terrain, will cut this significantly, but a range of only 4 km seems exceedingly conservative -- especially in light of the claim that the 900 MHz Cell C is using has a greater range than the original VC and MTN bands.

Anyone else have another take on this question of Cell C's tower range?
Click to expand...

On the road they use different antennas than the ones in the suburbs. Also, in the suburbs they won't push the output power of the transmitter as high as on the road, for the simple reason that high output power increases interference on any other towers they have in the vincinity. Ask your local CellC rep if they can give you something to test the signal at home once the tower is up and running - there are really too many unknowns in this equation that will need to be answered by CellC's radio planners: planned signal strength, antenna type, LOS to your house (Rustenburg is a hilly area) and antenna panning.
 
Terencek said:
On reflection the original answer to this query seems a bit problematic: that one would be lucky to get a range of 3 - 4 km from the tower.

Out on the road as we all know from long trips, we can go up to 50 km between towers yet still retain signal. Admittedly city landscapes, or extremely hilly terrain, will cut this significantly, but a range of only 4 km seems exceedingly conservative -- especially in light of the claim that the 900 MHz Cell C is using has a greater range than the original VC and MTN bands.

Anyone else have another take on this question of Cell C's tower range?
Click to expand...

Not necessarily. If the op means '3G' signal (W-CDMA) the range is significantly reduced from a GSM signal since it is very sensitive to power allocation and control (look up direct sequence spread spectrum). GSM signal usually has a larger cell size since it is TDMA based (much easier to do timing control since the time is not affected by the environment).
 
I used to get 11 km on 2100MHZ on vodacom with the help of a Poynting Antenna. I am sure with an outside antenna you will be able to connect.
 
...antennas screw up WCDMA networks....

2100mhz and 900mhz WCDMA networks can reach upto 100kms with high gain antennas and high power outputs,but these measurements are over rural areas with very few users, ie 1-2 simultaneous users.

In urban areas the power is reduced and antennas tilted in order to cover smaller concentrations of users, this is due to the limitations of WCDMA and the cell breathing effect whereby a cell will reduce its cell boundry based on the amount of simultaneous users.

But to answer the OPs question, 900mhz will prob give you a few hundred meters more coverage than 2100mhz, but more building penetration. SOo if the tower is like 5km from your house, chances are you wont get a decent UMTS signal if any.
 
In fact good antennae will increase distance in times!
Originally your modem is device with, let say, 0.1W output power and 5 x 10cm recieving area (from where it absorb signal).
All the power is transmitted to all directions. If one use antennae which direct modem radiation to the 90deg angle, this is equal of 4 times increase of the output power!
Incoming signal will be amplified by increasing absorption area.
Best solution for the extra long distances is sattelite dish.
Modem have to be positioned instead of LNB (in dish focal point) and dish have to be pointed to the tower (insure that you KNOW how to do this!).
10-20km distance @ full speed is easy achievable with such design.
Another issue is that tower measure YOUR signal and in case of the small level it will DECEASE connection speed.
Strong signal from modem will tell to tower to run at full speed.
 
Interesting idea! Can you REALLY simply mount a modem in front of a satellite dish to improve the signal, i.e. are they really compatible? And would this be as good as or better than buying and installing a dedicated data antenna (e.g. from Poynting)?
 
GRES said:
In fact good antennae will increase distance in times!
Originally your modem is device with, let say, 0.1W output power and 5 x 10cm recieving area (from where it absorb signal).
All the power is transmitted to all directions. If one use antennae which direct modem radiation to the 90deg angle, this is equal of 4 times increase of the output power!
Incoming signal will be amplified by increasing absorption area.
Best solution for the extra long distances is sattelite dish.
Modem have to be positioned instead of LNB (in dish focal point) and dish have to be pointed to the tower (insure that you KNOW how to do this!).
10-20km distance @ full speed is easy achievable with such design.
Another issue is that tower measure YOUR signal and in case of the small level it will DECEASE connection speed.
Strong signal from modem will tell to tower to run at full speed.
Click to expand...

Yeah, an antenna can increase your signal. True, no problems with that. But using a large enough antenna can increase the EIRP of your signal to illegal limits. Also, you need to get the correct frequency antenna. The closest sattelite to 900MHz is C-band, which is about 3.4GHz. So where it might work well for i.e. 2.1GHz signals, it will work less well for 900MHz.

1) Getting the antenna pointed at the tower is called panning.
2) Antennas, not antennae. You get antennae on insects.
3) A four times increase in output power is called a gain of 6dB.
 
Dear Tacet
We can speak more professionaly as i have 30y experience in electronic design and 25y in antenna design
Sorry, but i can state that ANY band dish will work! Please read proper literature.
Further improvement will be to place modem into waveguide and poin it to dish.
There no problems with EIPR as you not increase output power of the legally designed output stage of device
This question was discussed 6y ago when i build 18dB antenna for iBurst
All these tricks you use to bring link signals to proper levels to achieve normal speed

PS! Sorry for my English. My home language is very far from English, German and other latinic languages . . .
 
Tacet said:
Yeah, an antenna can increase your signal. True, no problems with that. But using a large enough antenna can increase the EIRP of your signal to illegal limits. Also, you need to get the correct frequency antenna. The closest sattelite to 900MHz is C-band, which is about 3.4GHz. So where it might work well for i.e. 2.1GHz signals, it will work less well for 900MHz.

1) Getting the antenna pointed at the tower is called panning.
2) Antennas, not antennae. You get antennae on insects.
3) A four times increase in output power is called a gain of 6dB.
Click to expand...

GRES is right I'm afraid. EIRP remains the same (since it's effective isotropic radiated power, so, if you were to put an isotropic power on the transmitter instead of what you're using, what would the power be).

Any satellite dish will work as long as the reflector material's spacing (0 in a solid dish's case) is less than the (shortest) wavelength of the signal.

As for the 10-20 km, on a GSM design, yes. But for HSPA, anything in the Fresnel zone will severly affect that figure due to the larger constellations (smaller detection distance) used in HSPA.

GRES said:
Dear Tacet
We can speak more professionaly as i have 30y experience in electronic design and 25y in antenna design
Sorry, but i can state that ANY band dish will work! Please read proper literature.
Further improvement will be to place modem into waveguide and poin it to dish.
There no problems with EIPR as you not increase output power of the legally designed output stage of device
This question was discussed 6y ago when i build 18dB antenna for iBurst
All these tricks you use to bring link signals to proper levels to achieve normal speed

PS! Sorry for my English. My home language is very far from English, German and other latinic languages . . .
Click to expand...

Where are you from guy? Slavic language?
 
20 - 25km without obstructions. Line of sight maybe more.

The big SP have about 6000 BTS covering 98% of the country on std GSM 850 and 900... So even on HSPA I'm sure Cell C can get about 20+km with one decent sized station.
 
@GRES - I haven't looked at the responses of satellite dishes. If the response is flat enough it will work. But I'd rather have the OP make sure of this before running off to source a dish which does not have a flat response. I've seen systems running about 10dB loss on microwave reflectors where the installer installed the wrong frequency dish.

@GRES & UnUnOctium - EIRP is the log sum of the transmitted power and the antenna gain. The antenna influences the EIRP.
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Wireless/7982.html
http://www.icasa.org.za/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=xhD3lUSs57c=&tabid=292&mid=1066&forcedownload=true (Look at note 4)
 
Tacet said:
@GRES - I haven't looked at the responses of satellite dishes. If the response is flat enough it will work. But I'd rather have the OP make sure of this before running off to source a dish which does not have a flat response. I've seen systems running about 10dB loss on microwave reflectors where the installer installed the wrong frequency dish.

@GRES & UnUnOctium - EIRP is the log sum of the transmitted power and the antenna gain. The antenna influences the EIRP.
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Wireless/7982.html
http://www.icasa.org.za/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=xhD3lUSs57c=&tabid=292&mid=1066&forcedownload=true (Look at note 4)
Click to expand...

Bah, disregard the EIRP statement, must've been a serious brainfart, was thinking of total isotropic power density/energy flux.

The rest holds valid though, (solid) satellite dishes shouldn't have a frequency response since they're reflectors, not antennae and them being solid metal means that all radio wavelengths are reflected.
 
For your information the maximum transmitted power specified for couple of modems:
- E1820: WCDMA/HSPA+ 2100MHz:+21dBm (Power Class 4)
- E180, E270, E220: HSDPA/HSUPA/WCDMA (in all supported bands) +24 dBm (Power Class 3)
 
A absolutely non-expert's question arising from the above please: does this mean that the E180, for instance, is therefore a 'better' modem than the E1820, or is it the other way around, or is this question entirely nonsense?
 
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