How Can You Identify a WIND Tower in the City?

[rangelpm]

We all like talking about coverage here, specially for new carriers. Recently I noticed some technicians installing a cell tower near St Clair and Young.

I thought this is a Wind tower for sure, however when I walked by it the signal with my Wind phone was not full bars as it supposed to be near a tower. This clearly indicates that the tower either doesn't belong to Wind or is inactive.


Question: How can we identify a Wind tower? Can they be identified by the shape of the antenna for example?

The tower I am talking about is not listed in any website nor the official government one. Their shape is long and thin if you compare them with other old ones.


Any tips will be much appreciated...

[netcon]

these are typical WIND monopole towers..(note square grey boxes under antennas these are Nokia RF units). WIND's towers usually don't exceed 100ft. to avoid extra permits to deploy them:

[rangelpm]

Do you know what kind of hardware Wind uses for their towers?

[netcon]

East - Nokia (RF access) + Dragonwave (Microwave backhaul) can be seen in the bottom photo on the top of the tower round microwave dish with Dragonwave's Horizon microwave RF unit on the back (cannot be seen in the photo, but it's there :-).

West - Alcatel-Lucent (RF access) + Dragonwave Horizon again for microwave backhaul.

[rangelpm]

So the Nokia (RF access) are the "long thin antennas" and the Dragonwave are the dish antenna that connect the towers?

For some reason I always thought that every single cellphone tower had to be connected by a wired cable...lol


Thanks for the explanation.. if you have any Wind tower photo feel free to post here!

Cheers

[j0no]

The shape of the antennas has to do with the geometry of the coverage they're trying to effect with it, and has very little to do with who made it. At least, that's my understanding of it anyway. (Of course, there is variation in make, if you're keen enough to know what to spot. I certainly don't know the differences though!) I think netcon is talking about the boxes the antennas are attached to.

[T3rry]

you likely wont have full power below a tower as the signal goes right over top of you, a tower's signal radiates horizontally, not vertically.

[sheytoon]

East - Nokia (RF access) + Dragonwave (Microwave backhaul) can be seen in the bottom photo on the top of the tower round microwave dish with Dragonwave's Horizon microwave RF unit on the back (cannot be seen in the photo, but it's there :-).

West - Alcatel-Lucent (RF access) + Dragonwave Horizon again for microwave backhaul.

I'm being a bit picky, but the company is Nokia Siemens Networks, which is a joint-venture between Nokia and Siemens. Nokia does not build network infrastructure. NSN provides the radio access network as you've mentioned, along with Alcatel-Lucent.