mhammett

How likely is it that Sprint will use more than three antennas per sector? I have seen three per sector before. My reason for asking is entirely selfish. If they won't go more than three (I've seen four or more for other carriers), then I can potentially locate antenna between their existing antenna and leave the extra pipe for them if they ever add another sector.

Well, how dense do things have to get for them to even add the third? Where I remember seeing the third was at a state university, but that was before they added another whole site a half mile away, so those additional sectors may not even be required anymore.

I guess if the third antenna is a very remote possibility...  I'll just use the existing!


https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kkkxs7lzmjmo24f/AABpWsh63RDBxsgVpKUUP3Pza?dl=0

Again, no compensation of any kind goes to me, just spreading the information about what's going on.

Would Sprint be interested in any of these?

No clue. Maybe they're even the source of some of them? Pure speculation here.

Just to make matters clear, this is not a scheduled FCC spectrum auction. This is a private auction.

 

AJ

Correct.

 

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

http://www.scoop.it/t/broadband-by-rick-harnish/p/4047593048/2015/07/13/the-harnish-hypothesis-select-spectrum-to-host-ebs-and-brs-lease-auction-in-october-2015

 

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

I didn't see any other threads relating to EBS auctions, so I think I'm in the clear.

 

There's going to be ~500 EBS licenses up for auction soon.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5zk32cnd7d03ca6/Select%20Spectrum%20EBS%20Auction.pdf?dl=0

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wx5lhfv2aznicyu/Select%20Spectrum%20EBS%20Auction.png?dl=0

 

I'm a Check Point firewall engineer. Is there any work for me using their carrier-grade equipment at these IX facilities, or is it all dominated by Cisco and Juniper? Do they even have much firewalling going on? I have a feeling my IDPS skills wouldn't have much use there.

and actually, Cisco isn't overly prevalent in the IX market. It is usually Jennifer, brocade or extreme. Extreme seems to be picking up market share as there switches have a good time pls stack and the large exchanges use a lot of MPLS for scalability. Brought to you by voice to text, so hopefully it makes sense.

Thanks for the maps compliment.  I have used maps in our Microwave thread with more detail and offered my spreadsheets to others but gotten no takers.  http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/6836-microwave-backhaul-map/page-7&do=findComment&comment=422792. Another like would be appreciated. 

 

Due to the complexity of some of the FCC data I started putting it into a spreadsheet to make sense of it.  I try to cover a complete geographic area that the FCC uses so I can better keep track of changes (state or county).  The Columbus Clear microwave map is a test of a simpler version of the spreadsheet.

 

I guess the 23,000Mhz microwave Mbps equivalent to fiber first depends on the level of risk that is acceptable.  Now Clear and Sprint appear to use much smaller dishes than your examples -- about 12 to 18 inches in diameter.   Thus my guess for 23000 @90% is about 92% of maximum capacity --  a more exact formula for rough estimation or better guideline would be welcome.  In practical terms, it appears they would bump it up one level for the transmitter manufacturer, which is what seems to be happening.  Obviously there are exceptions for the spurs, and all of the loop links would need to be calculated. 

 

Looks like no short-cuts except to go out in the early morning and measure pings to find the fiber sites (trace routes did not seem to previously work - must be using VPN or virtual LAN type tech).   My feeling is the stand-alone Clear sites using fiber are the most likely to be converted.

 

I was involved with negotiations with Clearwire when the network was setup.  They wanted the speed of using microwave over waiting for fiber.  Unfortunately a site that lies in a coverage hole in Upper Arlington Ohio was unable to be built because even though it got zoning approval, its connecting site did not (Clearwire did not want our assistance).  Sprint also has weak coverage in that area today.

 

I should be posting the Columbus Clear map with more detail and stats soon.

 

Thank you very much for your help (and examples).

 

 

I was following a guide (that didn't seem to work perfectly) to import the FCC's daily transaction log, dump it into SQL, parse it for the links, then dump out a KML. Getting the system together has been pretty manual, but the end result would be fairly easy to run again and again for anywhere.

 

I have exported 1' versions for 18 GHz and 23 GHz. I don't believe 1' antennas would be allowed in 11 GHz. These are just samples of one vendor's implementation. There are a variety of factors that go into what you use. I picked...  the easiest thing to generate pretty reports for you guys.  ;-)

 

Keep in mind that the sample link I used is 4.1666 miles. Something half of that length would perform much better at 23 GHz. Also, if throughput demands for a site are smaller (as such is the case for NV1.0 and Clear towers), the smaller dishes may provide the required throughput at acceptable reliabilities. The max throughput on even an NV2.0 tower (with one channel per band) is around 500 megabit. Now factor in how much you're likely to see with the varying modulations for the active users and you may never see anything close to that. They're probably okay with less.

 

Microwave ping times are going to be nearly indistinguishable from fiber ping times. Modern licensed microwave gear is going to have fractions of a millisecond per hop. The load on the management interfaces of the testing devices would play more of an impact. No clue on the stability of mobile LTE latencies.

 

There is going to be a layer 2 tunnel from the eNodeB all the way to the core. Traceroutes wouldn't help (unless maybe it was an MPLS transport and the gear was configured to respond with MPLS information...  unlikely.

I'm a Check Point firewall engineer. Is there any work for me using their carrier-grade equipment at these IX facilities, or is it all dominated by Cisco and Juniper? Do they even have much firewalling going on? I have a feeling my IDPS skills wouldn't have much use there.

 

Typically an IX is completely open and very basic. An IX may have increased measures on its management or operations networks, but the business end is not much more advanced than basic switching. Measures are typically in place to protect the IX operation, such as a single MAC per port. Route servers usually have route filtering of some kind in place to protect the Internet in general from operator (mess) ups.

A data center that I have worked with in the past has backbone interconnects (both fiber and microwave) for AT&T, Sprint,and Comcast, plus it has several smaller carriers on either dedicated fiber, microwave, or both.  It is used partially as a backup data center for one of the large Chicago data centers listed in the original post by mhammett.  It has multiple ways to get data to and from its primary data center.  If any data path is down (for example AT&T), the redundant nature of the networks causes it to automatically route around the problem to stay functional by possibly routing through Sprint or Comcast to a different IX and then back into AT&T's network.  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Router_%28computing%29 for how enterprise routers work.

 

Where?  o.0   ;-)

 

I'm guessing something government or financial given the degree of diversity and the carriers chosen. Then again, generic enterprise makes similarly odd decisions.  ;-)

Question on your links or hypothetical links in your network.

 

Let us say you wish to order a 1Gbps fiber link, but it is not available in a time fashion / has excessive costs.  What would be your equivalent order in Gbps over a microwave link operating at approximately 11,000Mhz? 

 

Let us say you get pushed further up the scale into rain fade territory at 23,000Mhz, would there be a compensating increase in designed bandwidth to compensate? 

 

Would any compensation for microwave (with or without rain fade) be based on any formula, let use say based on Mhz and distance? 

 

Would a bidirectional microwave ring design or feed from two directions be an effective alternative? 

 

I am trying to get a solid understanding of  Columbus's Clear Huawei network  to see what they might do in terms of site conversions and am done with about 75% of the raw data collection phase (our microwave thread excludes Clear). Of course additional tests will be done and additional information included.

 

Many thanks!!

 

Well, there are a variety of platforms to choose from, depending on how firm the throughput requirements are. The increases in frequency (and corresponding increases in rain fade) would dictate an increase of antenna size or switch to a platform with high enough Tx (transit) power or increase in Rx (receive) sensitivity to compensate for the losses.

 

There are formulas for rain fade by frequency, rain rate and distance. There are also formulas for dish size and frequency giving you it's gain, so you could make one formula to do all of that...  or just use the tools that are available and just choose a bigger dish and see what it gets you.

 

Here's an example of some links done at different frequencies and dish sizes. I haven't done much work at 23 Ghz, so I may simply be seeing a limitation of the product\tool. 23 GHz also appears to only be slated for 50 MHz channels as opposed to 80 MHz channels in 11 GHz and 18 GHz. I haven't verified if that's an FCC thing or a product thing. 2048QAM only seemed to be available on the 23 GHz radio and not the 11 or 18, so it made up a little bit for the smaller channel with increased modulation complexity.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/3smdt2g1ih0jg0b/AADie--OZ7vQNmTOHQSXLu3pa?dl=0

 

 

Having multiple links that go in different directions is good. For example, having a N-S link and an E-W link. Storms are typically lines and traveling along lines. A storm that went from West to East on an E-W link would experience a less intense fade for a longer period of time, while a N-S link in that same area would experience a more intense fade for a shorter period of time. If you have both and a layer 2 system that effectively measures available capacity dynamically and uses it in aggregate (such as Accedian or OpenFlow), then you are the least mitigated. Such fancy boxes are fairly new. Building these into a complete ring maximizes availability.

 

 

Nice maps! I wanted to generate that for all Clear\Sprint nation-wide, but I only got part way through setting up that system. I've been crazy busy the last year or two, so that hasn't been done. When Clear built their network, Fiber To The Tower wasn't a term yet, so they made do with what they had available. It was obviously being done, but it wasn't embraced like it is now. Many of those sites may have fiber available now. Many of those sites may be existing Sprint sites. Many of those sites may be close enough to build a backhaul to an existing Sprint site.

 

I would be using microwave a lot more if I were these guys. Every tower that is microwave-only would have at least two paths to fiber. Fiber drops would be to completely diverse fiber routes and providers. Fiber fed sites would still have a microwave path out to another fiber provider.

I was actually wrong. I'm reading into it a bit more and I see that NTIA aggregates the data that they get from the broadband providers.

 

As a broadband provider who submitted his own network coverage data....  ;-)

 

 

PS: I didn't know they have the population counts on the ISP pages. I guess I never got that far on their site.

The thing is though, the POP count is really explicit as well as seems rather correct which is why I keep repeating that it isn't just people downloading and coming up with numbers. There is a method to this madness and I think it involves the gov't much more than you're willing to give credit for. NTIA claims to have created and maintained this map themselves.

Where are these pop counts that you are talking about coming from this website? I have never seen any pop counts on the website. They are pretty easy to calculate, however. You load in the census shapefiles as well as the National Broadband map shapefiles. You select by attributes on the National Broadband map files and search for the company of interest and the technology of interest. You save that as a separate layer. Using clip the census shapefiles to the company and technology coverage layer, which will give you call census blocks that provider covers. You then simply add up All of the population count fields.

I realize that. I was simply stating that the government does in fact keep some sort of info about POP's as made evident by the existence of the site. Not that they get it for themselves.

 

I don't believe so. They keep coverage areas and said coverage areas are available for people to download as shapefiles and come up with their own statistics.

It seems as though what you said isn't exactly true. The link provided says "Created and maintained by the NTIA, in collaboration with the FCC" at the bottom of the page. It's more of a guesstimation that they do for nearly every carrier and cable co in the country. The numbers are fairly accurate considering what the carriers advertise.

 

As someone whose network is represented on that map, I can tell you that the government did not produce the data for that map. They aggregated it from the different state-directed non-profits or agencies. Those agencies may have generated the mapping data or the provider may have submitted it to them.

 

It is not like the FCC is aggressive in going after those who fail to build out anyway. There are plenty of spectrum squatters around.

 

That's on the list of things to get to for my trade association.

Wow, an IX!  What does one specifically look for if they wanted to work at one?  IX job postings?  

 

 

Whenever an ISP gets their backbone, do they connect at an IX, or do they "splice" into a cable that passes somewhere nearby?  My ISP (EPB, I am sure you have heard of them), uses Level 3, Century-tel and Sprint for their backbone.  How does EPB connect intothose backbones?

 

Any good sources on starting a WISP? Hardware, software, spectrum, licenses, who to talk too, etc.  What is the minimal capital one should plan on having to get started? There are a lot in my area that have zero landline option (800 residential households), and I have been thinking it might be cool to start a WISP in my local area.  Plus neighboring counties still have a few thousand here and there not served by landline.

 

Care to go into some details on your WISP? I'm sure you have a website?

 

Unfortunately, IXes are typically really lean environments. An IX with a couple hundred networks may have only a couple employees and they may even be part time. IXes are pretty simple to operate once the supporting infrastructure is built. Just keep an eye on area IX's web sites, social media pages, etc.

 

Some ISPs are so small that they're not even present in these carrier hotels. They're just buying services from whomever is in their area. I've been working to get as many as I can into these carrier hotels.

 

EPB appears to be in TelX in 56 Marietta Atlanta.  https://www.peeringdb.com/private/participant_view.php?id=7007 They are likely obtaining wavelengths (xWDM systems can take dozens or hundreds of circuits and put them on a single fiber (or pair of fiber)) and riding that into Atlanta. xWDM is part of the reason for the fiber glut of the early 2000s. A few networks will let you hop on anywhere, but most will only do so at defined POPs. https://radar.qrator.net/as26827 It also looks like they're using Cogent, Level 3 and Qwest as upstreams. I'd diversify that quite a bit more if I were them. They may be taking delivery of those different networks right there in Chattanooga, but they could be getting them from Atlanta as well.

 

I have a web site, but it sucks. It's ten years old. I started to update it, but I got busy with other work (the IX). Check out www.wispa.org for beginner WISP stuff. Join their public mailing list and people will likely just point you to a few resources to go over, but when there are specific questions, they'll be glad to answer.

 

 

Could you talk about capacity constraints?

 

Obviously there has been a lot of news about ISPs limiting interconnections against potential competitors (most recently a small streaming company in San Diego and TWC popped into the news).

 

As a WISP - how do you provide ample capacity for your customers?  Say you were buying capacity from cogent who was overloaded with netflix traffic - are you protected by SLAs to prevent that from being an issue?

 

Million questions... but it's a start... 

 

An IX likely has no capacity constraints. They're simple platforms that aren't trying to go hundreds or thousands of miles to the middle of nowhere. Usually the IX would be more than happy to sell more ports. That said, the big operations like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, TWC, etc. likely have direct connections to the major content networks. I didn't read into the details of that little streaming company, but to me it looked like a startup that doesn't know how the Internet works trying to game these new rules into getting stuff for free. (I'll try not to rant too much more on Net Neutrality.)

 

At the height of the Comcast - NetFlix - Cogent problem, the problem was between Cogent and Comcast. Netflix bought service from Cogent, so there wouldn't be any issues for other networks off of Cogent going to Netflix. There would be issues, however, with my network on Cogent going to anyone on Comcast, given that's where the congestion was. I would certainly be angry at my immediate upstream for having congested ports, but if the other party is unwilling to participate, there's only so much to do. Ultimate, it would be my situation to resolve for my customers. Maybe an SLA would play into things, but that's not going to prevent an issue from happening, only provide compensation when there's an issue. An SLA probably wouldn't even apply in that situation as it would be off-net.

 

I'd just obtain service from someone that didn't have the problem or get to the IX myself where I could work around the problem myself.

 

I don't have congestion issues in my WISP as I have built the network to have ample capacity.

[Reserved for future use.]

[Reserved for future use.]

(I got an initial okay from Robert for the topic, he'll weigh in later to give final approval.)

 

As some of you know, I operate a WISP and therefore spend time on towers delivering fixed Internet to homes and businesses. This past winter, I started an Internet Exchange (IX) with some partners. These are at a very different point on the Internet, more like the center.

 

Internet providers use largely fiber optics (although ocassionally microwave) to connect the local access points throughout the country back to facilities called carrier hotels. Carrier hotels are typically older buildings in major cities that have been repurposed for the Internet age. Dozens or even hundreds of networks converge on these carrier hotels to exchange traffic amongst each other. Often at these facilities you'll also find data centers where web hosting companies, corporations, etc. have located their servers. Why? That's where they have the most diverse supply of Internet for the lowest cost. Examples of carrier hotels are 60 Hudson, 350 Cermak, 1 Wilshire, 56 Marietta, etc.

 

The large networks such as Level 3 and Cogent would be directly interconnecting with each other with dedicated 10, 40 or 100 gigabit/s connections. However, those companies will only exchange traffic with other titans and now more often with the likes of NetFlix, Google, Facebook, etc. Everyone else joins the Internet Exchanges located within these buildings. A network purchases a port on the exchange, which then permits them to exchange traffic with any other network on the exchange. This is where you will most often find local and regional ISPs, web hosting companies, CDN giants like Google, Facebook, etc. Usually they'll have route servers. If a network connects with a route server, they automatically connect with all other networks on those route servers. This enables small networks to connect to people that might otherwise pass them by due to the work involved in manually configuring your router for each other network.

 

The largest IXes in the US barely break 300 members. The largest IX by members is AMS-IX, with 800 members connecting via several data centers in Amsterdam. AMS-IX has daily peaks of about 3.75 terabit/s. DE-CIX in Germany (I think largely Frankfurt) is the largest by traffic. They only have about 600 members, but they have daily peaks over 4 terabit/s.

 

The major Chicago facilities

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350 E. Cermak: Most connected building not on a coast. Largest single building non-government data center... in the world. Former RR Donnelly print house (Sears catalog and Ameritech phone books).

427 S. LaSalle: Former Western Union (telegraph and telephone)

520 S. Federal: AT&T CO that hosted AADS, one of the first exchanges after the Internet went public

600 - 700 S. Federal: Heavy data center and interconnection presence, likely due to 520 S. Federal being next door

 

Indianapolis

-----

Indy Telecom Center: Twelve to fifteen buildings hosting data centers, long haul POPs, AT&T MSC and an IX. Formerly a major rail facility.

 

 

I had something more majestic in my mind when I thought this up a week or two ago, but this is what I ended up banging out on the keyboard.

 

 

https://fortune.com/2015/06/08/cloud-computing-buildings/

https://www.peeringdb.com/private/exchange_list.php?s_name=&s_city=&s_ipaddr=&s_country=US&s_media=&s_region_continent=

http://long-lines.net/

http://www.cablemap.info/

http://www.telecomramblings.com/network-maps/

http://www.telecomramblings.com/metro-fiber-maps/

 

 

I'll now open this up to Q&A.

CellMapper has added hex representation to their site IDs. I think they need some deeper code changes to correctly identify the B41 sites as such.

00,01,02 band 25 

03 split between second carrier Samsung and  first carrier

04,05 second carrier Samsung band 25

09,0A,0B second carrier band 25

0F,10,11 band 26

19,1A,1B band 26

 

 

 

band 41 

GCI 3rd is number from the left is "odd" if(GCI && 0x00100000){}//band 41 

00,01,02 First carrier

03,04,05 Second carrier

31,32,33 First carrier

39,3A,3B Second carrier

I couldn't come up with a GCI number in that format. SignalCheck presents an eight digit hex that translates to a nine digit decimal, which seems to match the length in the CellMapper logs, but you've got an eight digit number where the third is even. I've been noticing in Signal Check logs that Sprint B41 has always been 07F.

 

That said, I also saw a couple Clear 07F GCIs. Could those be 8T8R conversions?

https://plus.google.com/+MikeHammett/posts/KTCdsMPNFpb

Is Ivan's assessment correct? I don't have the time to learn more about this to directly help him.

Let me know when you see any others get turned on

 

Is simply running SignalCheck in logging mode and driving near the towers good enough? I can put about a half dozen towers without detail on my route this morning.

Yep!! Check out the premier map

Your signature was a lot more useful to me than the premier map.  ;-)

A lot of things can happen in a year and there is no guarantee of what will happen.

 

What will happen is the implementation of lte advance software that helps optimizes the network without expensive and time consuming drive tests but who knows when those type of software will be implemented.

 

At this stage sprint is still mostly depends on Ericsson for network maintenance and optimization and we all know great they are.

 

I would spam the hell out of the sprint zone app to report the issues you're experiencing if all else fails sounds like either an issue with the cell sites or your device.

 

Sent from my Nexus 5

I believe one of the coverage or signal tools has an ability to generate technical information for submitting in those complaints. My network of around here is pretty solid, so I have no good way of utilizing that.