Originally posted by OldEngineer I don't have any inside info for you, but it does sound like a major upgrade in progress. Re-tuning PNs will often accompany such an upgrade.
Might that include retuning the age old numbering schemes?
Originally posted by ilvla2 That is kinda odd, you'd think they would have put them in SF, or Santa Barbara or somewhere on the coast at least. . .
Maybe because real estate and living expenses are less expensive in Sacramento.
Verizon Customer Support and Tech Support is in Rancho Cordova just east of Sacramento. Rancho Cordova is a hotbed of telecommunications centers. And Verizon has network people in Folsom.
Originally posted by ilvla2 . . . I didn't know our switch went all the way to Pleasanton, I knew it backhauled into Santa Rosa, but not beyond that, thanks for the info
To see where the Verizon switches are choose an area code and follow the hyperlinks to the switches for Cellco Partnership DBA Verizon Wireless:
Edit: There are many control points in addition to switches in these lists. But in some cases you are able to recognize the switches. Thanks to pbw for pointing that out.
Last edited by Life-Is-Good; 03-18-2004 at 05:34 PM.
Originally posted by Life-Is-Good To see where the Verizon switches are choose an area code and follow the hyperlinks to the switches for Cellco Partnership DBA Verizon Wireless:
Be wary that will also show alot of POPs. For example you will see about five or seven different switches ending in CM# for Virginia, but in reality there are only five:
The ones for Accomac (ACCMVA something) and others that end in CM# are not switches. Not all that glitters is gold and not all that ends in CM# is an MTSO/switch.
Originally posted by OldEngineer I don't have any inside info for you, but it does sound like a major upgrade in progress. Re-tuning PNs will often accompany such an upgrade.
×××× it to hell! That means changes are afoot down here. I noticed last week that the Richmond-Petersburg side of Sprint SID 4982 (NID 00080) changed from the standard Motorola sequential numbering scheme of 4 to a variable one. Base_IDs stayed the same but the PNs are totally different. Also the lowest valued PN no longer corresponds to the lowest valued Base_ID. Most distressing for all of the mapping I had done. On the Norfolk side things are still the same and I notice that the Washington/Baltimore and Philadelphia networks remain unsegmented and using standard Lucense seperation schemes of 168 between PNs and 256 between Base_IDs.
Several years ago I had read on USENET of Sprint doing this and to pull off the PN renumbering they had to take down the network briefly. I had only heard of this happening once and I did not think a carrier would change their offsets often, if nothing more than to prevent having to constantly turn the network on and off at 3am.
Originally posted by pbw ×××× it to hell! . . . Most distressing for all of the mapping I had done. . .
Yep. My personal database of towers has been blown away :laughs:
Originally posted by pbw . . . I noticed last week that the Richmond-Petersburg side of Sprint SID 4982 (NID 00080) changed from the standard Motorola sequential numbering scheme of 4 to a variable one. Base_IDs stayed the same but the PNs are totally different. Also the lowest valued PN no longer corresponds to the lowest valued Base_ID. . .
Verizon has already changed a lot of PN Offsets on towers here.
Base_IDs probably have to stay the same because those numbers come from the license.
I’m going crazy trying to figure out which offsets are familiar old towers and which are new towers being tested. Verizon sure knows how to confuse a geek
Originally posted by Life-Is-Good To see where the Verizon switches are choose an area code and follow the hyperlinks to the switches for Cellco Partnership DBA Verizon Wireless:
Keep in mind that this doesn't work correctly if you ported your number, since your number will still map back to your original provider. I ported my number from AT&T to Verizon, but the number shows up on the website as belonging to AT&T. Hence the LNP costs that the providers are charging to their subscribers, to maintain the mapping of your phone number.
Originally posted by Life-Is-Good Thank you very much for pointing that out.
It was a bad omission for me to neglect to mention that. I edited the original post.
No problem. To really refine these things one should combine the FCC cellular license boundary control points with a listing of switches. www.telcodata.us used to provide a street address and that could be used to eliminate POPs from MTSOs. However, not all control points are switches either, so it might help to try and cross refrence the FCC microwave records for a matching street address.
This actualy works but it a pain. PCS carriers are even more difficult to track down! I've yet to find a confirmed AT&T Wireless PCS MTSO. All refrences seem to be colocated at a major Bell tandem facility or one at one of the 145s. Nextel is ×××× near impossible and as far as I can tell they colocate at a Bell tandem office or with MCI (and good luck find MCI switches).
Originally posted by Life-Is-Good Yep. My personal database of towers has been blown away :laughs:
Naaa! The database is always good for plotting out the locations, as you have seen the location doesn't change, just the technical parameters. Now if you wanted to make a drive testing map listing the location as well as the site sector values (As I'd like to do with my list) then, yes, the list is toast.
Verizon has already changed a lot of PN Offsets on towers here.
Base_IDs probably have to stay the same because those numbers come from the license.
I’m going crazy trying to figure out which offsets are familiar old towers and which are new towers being tested. Verizon sure knows how to confuse a geek
If they did it Sprint PCS style all of them with in the NID have been changed, assuming they even bother with segmenting a SID into mutliple networks, otherwise all sites in the SID have probably been changed. Atleast you figured out the cool directionality trick about the PN offsets. I'm not sure they bother to do that here.
Where do the Base_IDs come off of the license? I'd love to know how they are composed, what the numbers mean. I've heard everything from convert the base_id to hex, drop the last character and convert back to decimal for the CID to just drop the last digit (which is a problem when carrier uses upper numbering Base_IDs, ie 02658, 02659, 2660). Also what about the carriers that used a non incremental seperations value like 256? Such confusion!
Samsung A900 Blade, Samsung MM-A880, Samsung a530s, LG VX6000
Siemens SL56, SE T616 (another RF nightmare)
Moto T720 ( flip phone w/flop performance)
Carriers
Sprint PCS
Geeking out? Not really, I'm just going to have to get a dictionary for this thread.
Geez, all these technicalities of towers, SIDS, LNP, the acronyms go on and on. But by all means, continue!
"Hey, don't obssess over your cell phone too much. There is more to life than swapping pros and cons with a lifeless piece of plastic and technology ."
Re: Geeking out? Not really, I'm just going to have to get a dictionary for this thread.
Originally posted by vespa55 Geez, all these technicalities of towers, SIDS, LNP, the acronyms go on and on. But by all means, continue!
Hell, while I'm procrastinating school work I might as well give it a shot:
PN Offset: Pesudo Noise Offset - unique per sector value (within an preconfigured area or search_window) used as a power to a random number to get a unique value for distinguishing the sector from the other noise in the area. Also used to aid in handing off calls between towers. I think
This is a very very poor and highly inaccurate definition of a PN Offset, all I remember is that it is unique within a search window, used in hand offs and used as a power to raise some number to. Corrections needed.
SID: System ID - 4-5 digit number used to unique identify a mobile system running AMPS (in its various flavors), TDMA (really D-AMPS) or CDMA. I say 4-5 because Nokia phones add an extra zero that may or may not be significant. GSM carriers don't use them, althought if they are an 800 mhz carrier they will have one in use from their AMPS/TDMA days or their CDMA operations if they overlay for roamers like some smaller carriers are doing. Either way it doesn't impact GSM operators. SIDs are part of a PRL which is used to generally dictate which systems a phone will roam on.
PRL: Preffered Roaming List - a binary file in your phone that contains a channel, sid and other values that determine which systems your phone will or will not roam on. Carriers use these with varying complexities. Some can update the list over the air, others force an over the air update and others make you call cust. serv. to have this update done or you have to go to a store and have a service person flash it.
NID: Network ID - used to break a SID into different parts. Not all carriers do this. What happens is your phone registers in a NID to a certain tower. Someone calls you and the carrier sends the call through their system which checks a database to see which NID you are in and then *all* towers in that NID broadcast the call setup info to your mobile phone. If there is not a NID then this is done system wide (ie all sites operating under that networks SID). There was a much better explanation of this elsehwere in the forums.
IRDB: Intelligent Roaming DataBase - PRL for TDMA systems made up of SOC or System Operator Codes and dictates roaming in the TDMA world. Updates are normally forced over the air. This explanation is not that great but with TDMA dying off who cares ;p
LNP: Local Number Portability - Your original number stays with you in the same area code/lata. Say your like me and started off with landline service with Bell Atlantic. You then moved your phone service to COX Fibernet, a CLEC. I got to keep my number by using LNP. So Bell is listed as the exchange owner but through the magic routing of various SS7 databases the call goes from Bell to me. Samething happens in the wireless world.
MTSO: Mobile Telephone Switching Office - equivalent to a GSM MSC (Mobile Switching Centre). There is a large boring set of cabinets that route calls, handle VM functions and database updates and in general control a network of towers. A switch can be connected to this network via microwave or telco carrier lines (T or DS or even OC for big man trunks ). This is where alot of magic happens, field techs are dispatched. Usually each major area in a market has one MTSO, although rural areas may have their switch many states away. Some small carriers lease or share switches with other carriers.
Originally posted by pbw . . . To really refine these things one should combine the FCC cellular license boundary control points with a listing of switches. . .
The FCC CP Control Point database is surprisingly easy to work with. It’s even more surprising that all of the street addresses of the switches and other control points are right there in a file that anybody can download from the FCC ULS Universal Licensing System web page.
How long will it be before the FCC stops publishing those addresses too? The locations of switches don’t change very often, so if you download a copy of the FCC databases now the listing of switch addresses should be reasonably accurate for years to come.
The FCC Control Point Database for Cellular is cp.dat, one of the files in the “Licenses” file listed under “Cellular - 47 CFR Part 22” about halfway down the right side of this page. If you don’t have a database program to use you can open the files in a spreadsheet like Excel:
Originally posted by pbw . . . Where do the Base_IDs come off of the license? I'd love to know how they are composed, what the numbers mean. I've heard everything from convert the base_id to hex, drop the last character and convert back to decimal for the CID to just drop the last digit (which is a problem when carrier uses upper numbering Base_IDs, ie 02658, 02659, 2660). Also what about the carriers that used a non incremental seperations value like 256? Such confusion!
Base_IDs on my Nokia are easy:
For example if the Nokia displays “427” as the Base_ID:
- convert “427” decimal to “1AB” Hex
- “1” says that this is an Alpha sector
- the Beta sector will be “2AB” hex or “683” decimal, which is what the Nokia will display for the Base_ID of the Beta sector.
- the Gamma sector will be “3AB” hex or “938” decimal, which is what the Nokia will display for the Base_ID of the Gamma sector.
To get the tower number:
- convert “AB” hex to “171” decimal.
“171” is the ID of the base station and the number that Verizon uses to refer to this tower in their databases (and for licensing?).
When talking to Verizon Tech Support, referring to the tower as “Tower 171” avoids the confusion of Verizon trying to determine which tower you are referring to by using your Zip Code and street address.
In northern California the towers are numbered sequentially as they are built.
There may be a scheme similar to this in your area, depending on how Verizon assigns Base_IDs in your area and how your phone displays them.
I hope that Verizon doesn’t change this numbering scheme.
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