I've noticed that here in rural Manitoba, Rogers has many many gsm-only towers that exist for seemingly no reason except to occupy channels and land.
I am wondering if this is happening elsewhere in Canada too?
Here it seems that many, but not all new modern Rogers signals such as HSAP or LTE outside of cities are being deployed on MTS/Bell towers sometimes right next door to their own existing towers even on the same piece of land!
I fail to see the ecenomics of this scenario making any sense to benefit Rogers or it's investors who spent so much money building towers, and then not using them.
There is another part of this that is aggrivating me: since a few years ago when the federal government introduced new rules mandating tower-sharing, I understood it to have the goal of causing wireless providers such as cellular and internet fixed-wireless outfits to to avoid building new towers where an existing tower would provide adequate antenna mounting and coverage. That would force the companies to cooperate in case they weren't already, and reduce the costs of deployment for new services to Canadians. It makes perfect sense to have a rule like this since we pay among the highest prices for service(poorest value of the whole planet). I've yet to see any evidence of tower sharing occuring under these circumstances! I can think of many many examples just this year, of new towers being installed RIGHT NEXT to existing equal or even superior towers, such as the aforementioned Rogers GSM underutilized towers.
Somebody please tell me how that a: can be allowed to occur, and b: makes any sense besides to waste maximum investment money, MUCH OF WHICH IS COMING FROM FEDERAL GRANTS?
I don't know the specifics. Assuming that the tower ownership is as you say, it could be that they're in the process of transitioning to new towers. Tower equipment does have a shelf live. In order to maintain continuity of service, they would build nearby while maintaining the old equipment.
In Ontario, I see many examples daily of towers within close proximity to each other. And while in some cases co-location could be possible, in many situations it may not. For example, it might be particularly difficult to co-locate where high capacity is demanded and service is offered on a variety of frequencies.
I can not speak about the Rogers old towers in Manitoba since I do not know the history over there about their towers etc. but I do know Ontario pretty good and I was following very closely the Fido to Rogers Network Integration years ago. My friend had a Fido tower like 3 houses away from his house, but when the networks merged, Fido decommissioned the tower, and his phone connected with the Rogers tower which was much further away, so his signal bars were a bit lower. but we would often go for walks in the area and wonder what the heck would they do with the old abandoned tower. Surely someone was paying the monthly lease and utilities for this tower which was on Crown lands (Hydro One right of way) it was actually abandoned for I would say almost 2 years before we saw some new antenna going up. We later determined that the old abandoned tower was purchased by Wind Mobile's parent company Global Live back then, which is now Freedom Mobile, a division of Shaw Communications. So there is definitely a market for old unused towers.
Somebody please tell me how that a: can be allowed to occur, and b: makes any sense besides to waste maximum investment money, MUCH OF WHICH IS COMING FROM FEDERAL GRANTS?
There are still GSM only phones in use. Many smart phones can also use GSM, if that's all that's available.
Here it seems that many, but not all new modern Rogers signals such as HSAP or LTE outside of cities are being deployed on MTS/Bell towers sometimes right next door to their own existing towers even on the same piece of land!
I fail to see the ecenomics of this scenario making any sense to benefit Rogers or it's investors who spent so much money building towers, and then not using them.
I can't speak about towers, as I've never worked on one, but I have worked on cell sites on top of buildings (I'm currently doing some work for Freedom). Those building top sites are often shared with other carriers. I've seen Rogers, Bell, Telus and Freedom, all on one roof. I even saw a sign for Dave on top of the Westin Hotel, in Ottawa. Dave became Mobilicity, which was bought out by Rogers.
Tower sharing is probably more of an issue in congested urban areas. Without sharing, one company could buy exclusive rights to the best building location. Then another company would need two towers on nearby buildings to cover the same area. Pretty soon, every building in some areas would have separate towers for every conceivable radio service. Just imagine what downtown Toronto would look like with a separate 1000 foot tower for every TV network instead of the CN tower. Then stretch that out for every cellular network and wireless communications service.
Abandoned towers are inevitable for any radio communications service. As technology evolves, needs change and infrastructure must be updated and relocated. It would be nice if unused towers were taken down promptly but that won't always happen for a number of reasons.
I remember back in the day there was this neighbourhood in Oakville, that had piss poor reception for Fido when it was a separate network back in the day, but when they tried to request a tower there, the citizens protested and complained that the unsightly towers would lower the property value of their homes and neighbourhood so the tower proposal got rejected and the residents had to suffer with poor reception no matter how much they complained. Soon After, Fido was purchased by Rogers, and when they amalgamated the networks, the Fido residents in that part of oakville were now getting reception because they were now connected to the nearby existing Rogers tower. This is one example of how network amalgamation can solve holes in the network.
Many of these new towers(far too many) are/have gone up within spitting distance of perfectly fine existing tower infrastructure that is either as high, or higher than the new, often of heavier-strength construction, and even triply redundant due to yet other existing towers sited nearby or directly-next.
And a decent percentage of the existing stuff is Rogers GSM-only and/or GSM TDM-microwave backhaul in-place and unchanged since the mid 1990's. Logically, I would have thought that Rogers would welcome the bonus income provided by having paying tenants on their towers where I'm certain the GSM traffic isn't paying the bills to keep the giant master/slave Bard wall-mount air conditioners/heaters running, taxes, certifications, relamping, and maintenance.
Rogers sharing their tower with Fido would have also solved the issue. The refusal to share towers and other resources by Rogers may have damaged Fido to the extent that is was forced to let itself be absorbed by Rogers. It's easy to stifle competition when you hold a monopoly on the resources required to conduct business.
Rogers did share a few towers with Fido (microcell) back in the day, its funny cus when the Fido equipment was decommissioned from the same tower, the phones automatically got signal from the Rogers antenna on that tower, but the coverage was different because Fido only had gsm 1900 at the time where as Rogers had GSM 850 and 1900 MHz broadcasting from their antennas so the indoor coverage was definitely an improvement
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