What happens on a backhaul failure?

[mirlyn]

So Issac had me thinking the other day.....what happens to a tower when the backhaul goes down? Does it fall back to a repeater from a neighboring cell, or does it go offline altogether?

[jefbal99]

If its microwave backhaul and on a spur network, then it should be able to go to a different source. If it backhauled by fibre/aav then it's probably down until the connection is restored.

[digiblur]

I was in an area today and I noticed I was only roaming. I could throw a rock and hit the tower. The tower had vzw and att on it as well. Roaming coverage worked just fine. Maybe vzw had backhaul via one of the radomes on the tower and the land line stuff was down. No telling, and I could see the flashing lights on the tower. Power was not out in the area. I could see the house next to it had power.

 

But no Sprint coverage. No trucks at the tower. I assume that when backhaul goes down it shuts off the signal or at least your phone will not handshake with the network and attempts to search for a native signal or roaming one.

 

Sent from my C64 w/Epyx FastLoad cartridge

[digiblur]

Delete. Double post from poor spacing on interstate and went to roaming.

[digiblur]

oooooo.. A triple post.

[iansltx]

When a fiber cut severed Windstream and Verizon (ILEC) from the outside world a couple years ago in central TX, everyone who had ILEC backhaul (nearly all cell providers, depending on the area) stopped broadcasting a usable signal. Everyone's phones said "no service" even though, other than the fiber cut, everything was fine network-wise. Time Warner Cable has their own fiber into the area so they weren't affected (nor was AT&T 3G in Kerrville from what I heard) but apparently TWC hadn't done any AAV contracts with cellular carriers in the area at that point, so everything just went offline for eight-plus hours.

[mirlyn]

That fits with my experience. Roaming/no signal after storms.

[WiWavelength]

I just hope that my fantasy football team this year does not experience as much "backhaul failure" as it did last year.

 

AJ

[digiblur]

I remember one day at work my T1 went down. Fractional at that. We had dial backup too. Went up to the front and all phones were dead too. Dead in the water. Everybody in the building used ATT except for me. The ATT tower next to us shutdown as well. All phones went to no signal unless they went outside.

 

I later found out that someone dug up something like a 900 pair cable. They were down forever it seemed. I had to sneakernet our data to another building. I couldn't imagine making that many splices. You have to splice it twice once you cut out the mess. 3600 splices.. Fun times.

 

We were located next to the airport and they were down as well. And the prison next door too. Hahahah... Only in Louisiana.

 

Sent from my C64 w/Epyx FastLoad cartridge

[tongboy]

Trying to bend a 50 pair direct burial copper cable to splice is hard enough... I can only imagine how thick and hard to manage a cable like that would be...

 

Sent from my EVO LTE

[digiblur]

Imagine fixing this... Wow.. 900 pair is child's play after this

 

http://m.eagletribune.com/eagletrib/db_262546/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=aC4q74Bh

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sent from my C64 w/Epyx FastLoad cartridge

[tongboy]

"No electricity was going though any of those cables"

 

I guess they were kind of right...

 

I wish I knew why our voice circuits go down sometimes. Usually how it goes with at&t is this:

 

At&t - "Sorry for your outage last night with one of your PRIs , I created a ticket (ticket number)

 

Me - "Thanks, please don't do any intrusive testing until tonight ."

 

At&t - OK. I will note that in the ticket.

 

10 minutes later one at a time all our PRIs go out of service for testing.

 

Sigh....

 

Back somewhat on topic, are there different circuits for voice and data at a cell tower?

 

 

 

Sent from my EVO LTE

[iansltx]

In some instances yes. I think that this is definitely the case for many (all?) pre-NV sites.