Nationwide 3G coverage - a proposal.

T

The_Unbeliever

Honorary Master
Joined
Apr 19, 2005
Messages
103,193
Reaction score
10,233
Location
Nkaaaaandla
To all the cellular providers out there.

I would like to punt a proposal to you. (Credit must go to Jannie who suggested it first).

In the cities you can do whatever you want to. I don't care.

However, the countryside is a different matter.

There's less people per square km in the country than in the cities, so therefore income will also be less.

So my proposal is to stop all petty bickering/rivalries/etc and start sharing a tower or two. This means allowing other providers to piggyback off your tower, whether they be Voda, MTN, CellC or 8ta customers - without throttling or restricting them in any way. No dirty tricks allowed. Or limiting them to EDGE/GPRS.

This will mean that the parties concerned have to share the costs of tower maintenance between them - which will be much cheaper than 1 provider trying to maintain a tower.

SO stop bickering and make this happen?

Thank you

Ook.
 
Doubt it will happen anytime soon.
Good idea though.
Maybe it would make things more sustainable for Jannie.
 
Providers investing to much in their own grids, will never happen.
 
they won't do it.. who pays for the tower? all of them? then how would sharing the costs work? must one pay more because they have more users in the area? ect. ect... why don't you just move from your farm to the city.
 
Why not?

ID_10_T said:
Providers investing to much in their own grids, will never happen.
Click to expand...

I am not so sure about that, we are seeing the major companies starting to wise up on sharing costs for laying fibre - so that is not to tough to extend to towers. I think the suprising thing is it was suggested by Jannie who probably has the least incentive as the smaller operators would find it harder to invest in this infrastruture themselves.

I think government should actually get involved and look at getting some good fibre loops out to rural areas to kickstart the process, they could even set up some towers for Wimax and lease the tower/equipment to the mobile operators. Imagine they took the Sentech 50Mhz and made it a jointly available frequency to all the operators, how amazing would that be?

I can tell you now there are definitely talks happening behind the scenes, the problem is just how long it will take for it to go from discussion to action (see ICASA LLU).
 
The_Librarian said:
So my proposal is to stop all petty bickering/rivalries/etc and start sharing a tower or two. This means allowing other providers to piggyback off your tower, whether they be Voda, MTN, CellC or 8ta customers - without throttling or restricting them in any way. No dirty tricks allowed. Or limiting them to EDGE/GPRS.
Click to expand...
They already share towers. Do you mean allow roaming?
 
ginggs said:
They already share towers. Do you mean allow roaming?
Click to expand...

At this stage there's too much backstabbing etc going on behind the scenes.

For example CellC is still limited to EDGE whilst roaming.


EDIT : And in the cities (and other urban areas) this will allow a degree of redundancy if a fiber cable (or sundry critical equipment) is sabotaged deliberately.
 
Last edited:
Bern said:
I think government should actually get involved and look at getting some good fibre loops out to rural areas to kickstart the process, they could even set up some towers for Wimax and lease the tower/equipment to the mobile operators. Imagine they took the Sentech 50Mhz and made it a jointly available frequency to all the operators, how amazing would that be?
Click to expand...

Government - If we want our connections to drop constantly - yes maybe then government, but we dont want that to happen now do we
 
AutoX said:
Government - If we want our connections to drop constantly - yes maybe then government, but we dont want that to happen now do we
Click to expand...

Sorry, I was not clear about the government context, I mean government should use regulation and incentives (tax or other) to promote this initiative. On specific incentives if they would provide trenching and tubing for fibre to be blown through or dark fibre that would be epic! then the gov bureaucracy can't ruin good business, but the large scale government leverage on infrastructure can lead to much reduced costing.

Imagine they did fibre along all roads with a node every 5 kms. Maybe even a tower too. Then Telkom, VC, MTN, Cell C, 8ta, IS, whoever can buy fibre and rent space on the tower. Maybe have two or 3 independant service providers for maintaining the fibre and off we go!
 
What we need is an 'independent tower company' that caters for all incumbents, they put up the tower & everyone leases space/bandwidth from the towers. Sorta like 3G-LLU.
 
I'm sure that all of the cell players have a cost formula for setting up a tower as part of their budgeting process.

If a 'standard' cost formula, based on these could be created by an independent (who?? ICASA :sick: should be the appropriate) authority, then towers could e shared on a proportion of the cost for each sp.

But that ain't never going to happen!
 
Good idea, BUT in the old days just telkom were allowed to give networks to the towers, and they only needed like a few timeslots [1timeslot=64kb=4 cell speech channels].
Then came 3g. now they needed a few 2meg at a tower and it cost.
It is much cheaper to build your own network to the towers and save millions.
second problem, towers get midnight shoppers, So new towers is the pipe one where the cables goes inside the pipe, and this pipe can only hold one service provider.
Cellc 900mhz can go 10 km, and Voda/mtn 1800mhz only 3km. So cellc don't need a tower every 6km.
Red tape and politics and competition is the problem here.
And icasa controls all of this.
 
Robertvv said:
Good idea, BUT in the old days just telkom were allowed to give networks to the towers, and they only needed like a few timeslots [1timeslot=64kb=4 cell speech channels].
Then came 3g. now they needed a few 2meg at a tower and it cost.
It is much cheaper to build your own network to the towers and save millions.
second problem, towers get midnight shoppers, So new towers is the pipe one where the cables goes inside the pipe, and this pipe can only hold one service provider.
Cellc 900mhz can go 10 km, and Voda/mtn 1800mhz only 3km. So cellc don't need a tower every 6km.
Red tape and politics and competition is the problem here.
And icasa controls all of this.
Click to expand...
That 3km and 10km is speculation. How do you know what antenna config they use. Sectorized, omnidirectional, Tiered Sites as well as frequency re-use. Macrocells can have a radius of 35km which they use in the less populated areas. Microcells in populated areas. Theres lots of cell configs that determine distances. Then Some dual (triple) band antennas have the same gain at 900 MHz, 1800 and 2100 MHz. A antenna with 16.8 dBi of gain is more than twice the size of an approximately equivalent
antenna, with 16.5 dBi, in the 2100 MHz band. Building penetration increases with frequency so dont be fooled by the 900/2100 gimmick. You dont know what length of coaxial cable they used which is one of the important factors in gain/loss
 
"They" can have a 1000watt antenna, but your modem, cell phone only has a "2Watt" antenna and the higher the speed the shorter the distance.
In my town , a big cell shop is 2,5km from the 3g tower [1800mhz] ,have 3g then no 3g. Voda installed a micro in their building.
 
Stopped at a site where contractor were erecting a pipe tower. It is for Cellc. 500 meters from it, my company got a higher tower, and voda also share on our tower. Cellc did not apply for our tower. The pipe tower , 40 meter high weight just 8 tons.
 
Bern said:
I think the suprising thing is it was suggested by Jannie who probably has the least incentive as the smaller operators would find it harder to invest in this infrastruture themselves.
Click to expand...
There is motivation for ALL of the network operators to join in such a scheme. It's the USAF and costs the big players plenty of dollars! If they shared a network in rural areas they could lobby for the scrapping of the USAF contributions.

Licensees are further required to pay a contribution to the Universal Service and Access Fund (USAF) - an entity set up by Government to fund development of services in rural areas - amounting to 0.2% of annual turnover derived from licensed services.
Click to expand...
/thanks dominic: http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthr...ns-licensing?p=6443032&viewfull=1#post6443032
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X