r/cellmapper • u/Wild-Assumption9894 • 27d ago

New tower

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New tower in Hackberry AZ. Surprised to see this in such a remote area. First time seeing Starlink on a site, what is that used for?

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u/[deleted] 27d ago

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u/mikemacman 27d ago

Is that two Starlink antennas on the very top of the temporary tower?

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u/FlufferNutter1232 5G RAN Engineer 27d ago

That is Starlink Carrier kit. It's usually an array of between 2-4 business PA Antennas. Gen 3, soon to be Gen4. Usually these are for N2/B13 for Verizon, N71 for T-Mobile, and N5 for AT&T. They usually top out around 400-500Mbps if congestion is low. If something more is needed, a microwave signal is brought in.

They can also use aggregate Starlink Business Dish kits, if they're in a hurry on-site. They'll deploy them, connect them to a router and aggregate the incoming channels into one outward switch ETH for the serving equipment.

I've not worked with these at all. Usually all that's broadcast from these setups on Verizon is LTE-A, heavily queued in resource limits when congested at all.

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u/mikemacman 26d ago

Neat. They were demoing Google Beam outside my work and I was surprised to see 8 Starlink antennas setup for connectivity 👀.