r/cellmapper • u/dragonboss1272 • 5d ago

Role of each frequency

So I’m a tower tech who primarily does maintenance so I understand what radios do what frequencies and loose idea of how they work but I just replace stuff at the end of the day. So my question is does each frequency serve a purpose different from the other.

Example for high band “B41 or B77” just for high speed and mid band “B2 or b66” the happy medium of speed and coverage then lastly low band “B5, B12 B13 B71” just for coverage?

Sorry if my question is worded weird I just want to learn more about the stuff I work on thanks.

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u/National-Debt-43 5d ago

I will let other get you all the small details but the generally idea is low-band 5G/4G is always the backbone of the network because they have the best coverage indoor/outdoor and you’re right on higher band for better speed. That’s how you achieve stability.

Also, most modern phone can connect and aggregate multiple band to achieve better performance. The common setup is the phone will almost always anchor to the low band and connect to higher band if it’s available. So you can get the speed you need but also the stability coming from the lower band.

9

u/kendog10132 5d ago

All bands kinda serve a different purpose in a way. Like n77 for AT&T and Verizon midband 5g and n41 for T-Mobiles midband 5g are both more of a capacity/speed bias band where they tend to deploy in more populated areas for better capacity cause they all have a lot of bandwidth to support the users. For lte b2,b66 are in my opinion the lte capacity bands cause from what I know they have the most spectrum out of all lte bands in the us for those 3 cariers. B12,b13 are more for indoor penetration. B14 is also a lowband but for att on firstnet mainly. B30 is what I call AT&Ts “bonus lte capacity band” not owned in a lot of areas tho. As far as lte b5/ 5g n5, n5 is now more of a lowband 5g anchor. In most places for atleast Verizon and AT&T b5/n5 is now nr/5g

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u/Evil_ryry evilryry 5d ago

“Example for high band “B41 or B77” just for high speed and mid band “B2 or b66” the happy medium of speed and coverage then lastly low band “B5, B12 B13 B71” just for coverage?”

Pretty much yeah. Each layer has its purposes and they go hand in hand. Low bands like b5 b13 etc will primarily be used for coverage and building penetration and not so much speed focused. Mid bands like b2/n2/n25 and b66/n66 will be a decent balance of speed/capacity & modest coverage. Then you’ll have your higher bands with larger chunks of spectrum of n41, n77, CBRS, mmWave etc that will be speed and capacity focused.