what do the AT&T vans connect to? I assume that there is no landline available for them to hook into, so how are they providing service?
my guess is satellites or communicating with other cell towers but the latter seems counterproductive as it would push a high load to a different cell tower. but if they used satellites, wouldn't there by high latency and bandwidth limits?
A few months back we were exploring a abannonded building (scheduled to be demolished), and we found there was a working cell tower ontop of the building. There was a small server room that had all the eqipment to run everything (I think it was shared by the 2 big telco's here in NZ).
From what we would could see, there were a bunch of ancient racks running 2g gear that looked at least 10 years old (all beige), and then a whole 42U rack of 12v batteries for a UPS.
Then there was a quarter-rack which had a bunch of fibre cables going into a few Huawei branded 1u boxes. LTE only got deployed a month ago so it much of been HSPA+.
I think if they had a satellite connection there would be too much latency. And the throughput wouldn't be limiting as well. They could of had one as a backup source though, or just setup as a secondary connection.
The image at the very top of the article mentions they have a microwave backhaul (see "E"), which I'm assuming goes to another ground location (i.e. a central office.)
Actually this makes better sense than what I was guessing about cell towers below. So, what I'm imagining is these temp towers will make sure that you can get connected.
I think ATT is a tier 1 network, so your connection to whatever data center will probably get bonded directly to whatever ATT datacenter which has the fastest response (ping) to the content your connecting to...love to see a traceroute for comparison.
I've actually wondered this too. I remember hearing about these temp towers at the 2013 inauguration. I understand how they allow more users to get a signal, but as you said.....what is the backhaul actually on? It could be distributed through a cell tower you may not get a signal from is my guess (like 1 that's 1mi away), or ran on a fios network (like voip).
I've seen line-of-sight microwave used for similar needs, but not in built up areas.
Edit: clicking through and actually reading the link, the picture clearly depicts Microwave backhaul. Probably to a site in the vicinity they have a nice big land-based pipe.
The article describes the microwave link as 'additional capacity', so I'm guessing that they had another (primary?) connection, but needed more throughput.
When the rugby world cup was running last year I saw a number of temporary cell sites, which had plastic ducting and fibre optics running ~50-200m to existing telecoms cabinets or cell sites.
I imagine that At&t is doing something similar, hooking into an existing cable at the nearest roadside cabinet or traditional cell site.
my guess is satellites or communicating with other cell towers but the latter seems counterproductive as it would push a high load to a different cell tower. but if they used satellites, wouldn't there by high latency and bandwidth limits?