TOWER SITE SELECTION

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How are locations for towers selected? Why do they appear to pop up everywhere?

Cellular tower locations are the result of an engineering field called Radio Frequency Engineering or RF, for short. RF engineers at the various wireless companies such as Cingular, Nextel, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile work closely with their marketing departments to determine areas where the placement of a new tower will accomplish one (or more) of three goals:

  • Expansion: The tower site provides coverage over areas that do not currently have coverage.
  • Capacity: The tower site provides additional capacity for the carrier to handle more calls in areas where existing towers are overloaded.
  • Quality: The tower fills in a hole or an area where customer calls are frequently dropped or call service is poor.

In either case, the tower must serve a specific purpose. The majority of the times, that purpose is to increase the data and call reception that people receive or send through their phones.

Data usage and call volumes are highest in areas of high traffic and travel, and where there are large concentrations of business and work centers. Urban and suburban areas have the highest concentration of cellular sites and towers. Please see the Types of Cellular Sites webpage for more information. To provide coverage for people traveling between these particular urban/suburban areas, highways, state roads, and higher-traffic local roads are covered by towers as well. Placement of towers at strategic intersections of major roads is often preferred.

Carriers have been adding cell sites in rural areas as well in an attempt to provide ubiquitous coverage. However, before you assume that carriers will be knocking on your door for a tower, they still follow good siting practices. Sites must be near a major roadway. Rarely do wireless carriers build towers in the middle of nowhere. Cellular sites must meet one or more of the three goals listed above. Building a tower to cover rural farmland where no one lives does not serve any of these goals.

The marketing departments of the wireless carriers are constantly reviewing potential and uncovered areas to determine where to place new towers. Because carriers have capital budgets, the marketing departments and RF engineering departments work together to prioritize those sites that they believe will provide the most benefit to the company in terms of MOUs or quality of service.