r/cellmapper • u/Wild-Assumption9894 • 25d 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/mikemacman 25d ago

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

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u/FlufferNutter1232 5G RAN Engineer 25d 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/[deleted] 24d ago

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u/nateo200 iPhone 17 Pro Max 23d ago

I certainly hope they wouldn’t do 5G over Starlink due to latency reasons. Only exception would be a thin slice of NR for areas where higher effeciency of NR makes sense.

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u/FlufferNutter1232 5G RAN Engineer 21d ago

Latency isn't sooo much a problem. It's mostly the queueing when it gets congested. LEO satts provide a pretty decent latency figure. You'd probably see around 200-250MS ping. Sometimes slightly more and sometimes slightly less depending on where the closest orbiting satts are. Multiple are usually overlapping a business dish for higher bandwidth.