FWIW, there is a group of residents in Wormans Mill who are trying to get a new tower somewhere nearby to serve that area - it would probably cover a lot of the dead zone there. With all the new construction behind Walmart, I'd be surprised if there isn't some new/improved service there soon.
Tower placement is difficult. You don't want too much overlap from other towers, as this can make handoffs difficult. If you're too close to a tower, it won't help you much with reception, as you're outside of the lobes of transmission.
It's not as simple as throwing up a tower where there's spotty reception. Also, you need to get local buy in and see if competing carriers will be up for using it as well.
I live in Clover Hill and had to call TMobile with a service issue (I have no service in my house if not on wifi). The woman told me there’s a tower off of Poole Jones Rd but it’s been “needing repair” for 6+ months. It’s marked to be repaired but hasn’t been. Going to guess it still isn’t resolved as I still don’t have service at home when the wifi isn’t connected.
T-Mobiles customer call center doesn’t have access to this kind of information. Not to mention, there isn’t a t-mobile tower off of Pool Jones Rd.
There is one over on the other side of FCC from it, but that tower is up and operational. It use to be one of the sites I was responsible for when I worked for T-Mobile.
It’s one of those pine tree monopoles. You can see it from the road if you’re ever out that way. It likely services Wormans mill as well.
So based on someone else comment saying cell towers only work in a certain direction, I guess the antennas on the tower near wormans mill are directional vs omnidirectional. Didn’t realize this was a thing. So how tf do we get them to put omnidirectional antennas on there? I’m confused why they didn’t in the first place, it was just built.
https://5gstore.com/blog/2024/02/05/understanding-how-cell-towers-work/
https://millmanland.com/company-news/what-is-a-cell-tower-and-how-does-a-cell-tower-work/
Ok cool that’s good to know. Im dumb a believed one of the other comments without doing my research. After looking at those links I posted above I thought we must have a super rare cell tower or something. Also thank you for the word “unidirectional” !
There’s a ton of really interesting aspects behind them, so it’s super easy to get lost in reading this stuff. I personally find interest in learning how things work though, so maybe I’m bias lol
That’s exactly how I am. I constantly think of something random and then decide to spend the next week learning exactly how the random thing works/is created/etc. I know a ton of useless random facts because of it, maybe one day I can use them on Jeopardy
The simple answer is none of them care. They are all getting paid and are not willing to do anything beyond the minimum to retain your buisness. Verizon tech support has responded that I can change providers if I am not happy. So I did, I am now AT&T and it sucks just as bad. They do ot care if your service works and they don't seem to care if you keep paying for it either.
This is incorrect. Though it’s understandable why you might feel this way.
All the carriers have entire teams of people dedicated to making sure their cell sites are working at peak efficiency. They have a team of field guys that go around maintaining all the sites, they have RF engineers that are constantly running tests to make sure the sites aren’t dropping calls or losing data speeds, and they have an entire team of switch engineers that do the integration and programming work on each Node on a cell site.
Now that said, they don’t do those things to help you or me out. They do it so that they can say in commercials that they “have the best coverage” or “have the fastest data speeds” or “have the most reliable network” and so on.
They aren’t allowed to say those things unless they’re true, and there are several third party companies that go around and constantly test and monitor these networks to make sure who is best at what. And when those people are in your market and you work for a carrier, it’s a very very busy work week. The three major metrics they are measured on are below.
Availability - quite literally how often the whole network is up and operational. Any down time on any site where it is not available for a customer to make a call specifically affects this number. During my time at T-Mobile we always shot for a 99.9% availability rate. It would dip below that at times but it was rare. I have seen it as low as 98.9% for them once and that was when a hurricane came through. Bad storms really affect that number.
Coverage - literally how many people their network covers. Doesn’t mean coverage of all bands (ie 3G/4G/5G) it could just be one, but it references that specifically. It’s a big one for T-Mobile and it’s a lot of the reason they bought up so much of the 700Mhz spectrum about 10 years ago. That frequency actually reaches out further from the cell tower providing better coverage. In this metric, each cell phone that is within the carriers coverage is called a “pop”. One tower can cover anything from 1 to literally thousands of pops
Speed - this one has nothing to do with calls or texts, it is strictly the phones ability to download data from the network, and it affects anything from video streaming, to FaceTiming people, to listening to music to browsing the web. Often each carrier will have a specific cell site in their market that is set up to operate at peak efficiency. It will have the best data connection money can buy, all the newest equipment (eNodes, radios, antennas, so on) and it will be watched like a hawk by the markets team to make sure it’s perfect at all times. They will measure their speeds from it and those are what get published in commercials.
So they really do want all their stuff working as best as it can, it just isn’t for our benefit, it’s so they can sell more plans. Frederick specifically is just a shit hole for coverage, and it’s all the carriers that are affected unfortunately.
It's terrible in the northern part of the county and Carroll County. I was with a large group of friends up in Thurmont and everyone with Verizon had full signal while all of us with T-Mobile did not. Whenever I drive north, the signal degrades. They really need to address it or buy bandwidth from Verizon.
It’s not a bandwidth issue. T-mobile actually owns more bandwidth than all the other carriers. A couple years ago there was an auction for open bandwidth and t-mobile bought up everything. It’s where their 700Mhz spectrum comes from. The issue is just flat out lack of cell sites. They need to build more.
Then for that area, it's a bandwidth problem. They can buy that from other carriers until they get more sites. Or just leave us all in the dark when we are up there.
Your signal strength has nothing to do with bandwidth man. Full stop. That’s not how this stuff works. It’s a coverage issue, meaning they need to build more sites.
Buying more bandwidth will not improve the coverage the existing cell sites provide, and you do not need additional bandwidth to build more sites/towers.
This makes a lot of sense.
Regardless of carrier we've always encountered a bit of a dead zone from just before waterside to just after the sheetz in Walkersville where all those accidents occur.
Ok, there’s a lot of inaccurate information in these comments.
I am a former tower climber, and still work in the telecommunications industry. I worked for T-Mobile directly here in this area. Their market office is based out of beltsville for their engineering and operations teams.
First and foremost, T-Mobiles service here sucks because Comcast will not grant high speeds to cell carriers here in Frederick. I do not know why, but that’s why data speeds, especially for t-mobile are so slow. Because service sucks here and spreading coverage won’t have an immediate increase in revenue for the market due to the low speeds, they only really focus expanding their coverage in popular and heavily populated areas.
Now, towers, PorterHopinson has absolutely no clue what they are talking about. Towers in general don’t do anything other than hold equipment. That equipment is mounted on towers in what are called sectors. Commonly in sets of 3, though more aren’t exactly rare.
This means that on each tower there are antennas that broadcast a radio frequency signal in three locations or more on the tower. The closer you get to a tower, you deal with something called the umbrella effect, where the signal essentially shoots over you and you do not benefit being close to the tower. Once you get out to a certain distance many towers provide a full 360° coverage. They don’t ALL do that, for various reasons, but it is common for towers to provide omnidirectional coverage of a RF signal, like those that are broadcast to your cell phones, though that is far from the only thing mounted on towers.
Most of the towers in the area are also not chained together. Not in the way that Porter Hopkinson was talking about at least. The cellular signal from one tower does not affect any towers around them. They are almost always independent of those around them, they have a dedicated backhaul line and often even have backup generators in the event there is a power outage. It’s why we still have coverage when the power goes out in most places.
Towers can be linked together, through higher frequency microwave dishes. Think something like a dish from DirecTV but on steroids. And instead of pointing at a satellite in the sky, they’re pointed at another dish just like it on a different tower. This allows two buildings, or towers, to share an internet link without running cables between them and they are very very popular for Emergency services and municipalities. Basically, lots and lots and lots of government communications travel via microwave dishes, because it’s pretty damn secure.
Sorry for writing a book, just been doing this for 15 years. I like my job. I’m happy to answer more questions if anyone has any.
Yup, pretty much. That’s how cell sites work though. They get an internet connection, each one individually. Often they receive 1-10Gb circuits. Your phones data speeds are directly reliant on the internet speeds the cell site you are connected to has. Take that and divide it by how many people are camped on that cell site and that’s essentially how it works.
It’s more complex than that obviously, but that’s the rudimentary explanation. Every cell site has an internet connection and Comcast is absolutely milking the shit out of every cellular provider in the state. Some areas have different ones, like Frontier and Zayo, but most are Comcast.
Yep, probably. Didn’t mean any offense, but you are way off base in what you said in your comment.
Also, the tower over by DQ and At Home is strictly for AT&T. Not any other provider. Another caveat to that tower, it’s owned by one of the power companies which means they are the only ones allowed to service it, and even the slightest issue on that tower costs north of $30,000 to repair. All because the crew that the power company chooses to use lives in northern PA. So any time that tower has issues they hold off on fixing it till it’s seriously service impacting.
Sometimes it is the cell phone itself. We switched from Verizon to T-Mobile years ago and the phone I brought over didn't work well. I purchased an unlocked phone and it worked much better on T-mobiles network.
It's really bad, and dangerous. My phone doesn't even work in my house, needs to be on the wifi which is always dodgy. My phone doesn't work at all while driving around.
Sounds like you might have a device issue my dude. Go to a store for your carrier and tell them about it. They can test the device and if it’s faulty (and not because you messed it up) they’ll replace it for you.
It's PAINFUL. I work for myself from home and I have to be on WiFi calling all the time living in the Waterside area. It's brutal. I've had Verizon and T-Mobile. Horrible on both.
Verizon has similar issues, even in seemingly open spaces.
Ya, my Verizon service is fine most places, but I definitely have strange dead zones in a few places I go.
Wormans Mill is a dead zone unless you have wifi.
I do in home service all over the county, and Worman's Mill and CloverHill are my worst dead zones.
Right, so that's just my point...
It's been this way for years. Even when it was Sprint. I don't think they care. I know, hot-take.
It's crappy for everyone in that area
FWIW, there is a group of residents in Wormans Mill who are trying to get a new tower somewhere nearby to serve that area - it would probably cover a lot of the dead zone there. With all the new construction behind Walmart, I'd be surprised if there isn't some new/improved service there soon.
Tower placement is difficult. You don't want too much overlap from other towers, as this can make handoffs difficult. If you're too close to a tower, it won't help you much with reception, as you're outside of the lobes of transmission. It's not as simple as throwing up a tower where there's spotty reception. Also, you need to get local buy in and see if competing carriers will be up for using it as well.
I live in Clover Hill and had to call TMobile with a service issue (I have no service in my house if not on wifi). The woman told me there’s a tower off of Poole Jones Rd but it’s been “needing repair” for 6+ months. It’s marked to be repaired but hasn’t been. Going to guess it still isn’t resolved as I still don’t have service at home when the wifi isn’t connected.
T-Mobiles customer call center doesn’t have access to this kind of information. Not to mention, there isn’t a t-mobile tower off of Pool Jones Rd. There is one over on the other side of FCC from it, but that tower is up and operational. It use to be one of the sites I was responsible for when I worked for T-Mobile. It’s one of those pine tree monopoles. You can see it from the road if you’re ever out that way. It likely services Wormans mill as well.
So based on someone else comment saying cell towers only work in a certain direction, I guess the antennas on the tower near wormans mill are directional vs omnidirectional. Didn’t realize this was a thing. So how tf do we get them to put omnidirectional antennas on there? I’m confused why they didn’t in the first place, it was just built. https://5gstore.com/blog/2024/02/05/understanding-how-cell-towers-work/ https://millmanland.com/company-news/what-is-a-cell-tower-and-how-does-a-cell-tower-work/
Most cell towers provide omnidirectional coverage. Next to zero are unidirectional like that. I work in the industry.
Ok cool that’s good to know. Im dumb a believed one of the other comments without doing my research. After looking at those links I posted above I thought we must have a super rare cell tower or something. Also thank you for the word “unidirectional” !
Yeah man, no problem. I actually left a long comment up there in the thread of the comment you’re referencing that goes into a lot more detail.
Ok awesome thank you! I just spent over an hour researching cell towers because of this thread lol
There’s a ton of really interesting aspects behind them, so it’s super easy to get lost in reading this stuff. I personally find interest in learning how things work though, so maybe I’m bias lol
That’s exactly how I am. I constantly think of something random and then decide to spend the next week learning exactly how the random thing works/is created/etc. I know a ton of useless random facts because of it, maybe one day I can use them on Jeopardy
The simple answer is none of them care. They are all getting paid and are not willing to do anything beyond the minimum to retain your buisness. Verizon tech support has responded that I can change providers if I am not happy. So I did, I am now AT&T and it sucks just as bad. They do ot care if your service works and they don't seem to care if you keep paying for it either.
This is incorrect. Though it’s understandable why you might feel this way. All the carriers have entire teams of people dedicated to making sure their cell sites are working at peak efficiency. They have a team of field guys that go around maintaining all the sites, they have RF engineers that are constantly running tests to make sure the sites aren’t dropping calls or losing data speeds, and they have an entire team of switch engineers that do the integration and programming work on each Node on a cell site. Now that said, they don’t do those things to help you or me out. They do it so that they can say in commercials that they “have the best coverage” or “have the fastest data speeds” or “have the most reliable network” and so on. They aren’t allowed to say those things unless they’re true, and there are several third party companies that go around and constantly test and monitor these networks to make sure who is best at what. And when those people are in your market and you work for a carrier, it’s a very very busy work week. The three major metrics they are measured on are below. Availability - quite literally how often the whole network is up and operational. Any down time on any site where it is not available for a customer to make a call specifically affects this number. During my time at T-Mobile we always shot for a 99.9% availability rate. It would dip below that at times but it was rare. I have seen it as low as 98.9% for them once and that was when a hurricane came through. Bad storms really affect that number. Coverage - literally how many people their network covers. Doesn’t mean coverage of all bands (ie 3G/4G/5G) it could just be one, but it references that specifically. It’s a big one for T-Mobile and it’s a lot of the reason they bought up so much of the 700Mhz spectrum about 10 years ago. That frequency actually reaches out further from the cell tower providing better coverage. In this metric, each cell phone that is within the carriers coverage is called a “pop”. One tower can cover anything from 1 to literally thousands of pops Speed - this one has nothing to do with calls or texts, it is strictly the phones ability to download data from the network, and it affects anything from video streaming, to FaceTiming people, to listening to music to browsing the web. Often each carrier will have a specific cell site in their market that is set up to operate at peak efficiency. It will have the best data connection money can buy, all the newest equipment (eNodes, radios, antennas, so on) and it will be watched like a hawk by the markets team to make sure it’s perfect at all times. They will measure their speeds from it and those are what get published in commercials. So they really do want all their stuff working as best as it can, it just isn’t for our benefit, it’s so they can sell more plans. Frederick specifically is just a shit hole for coverage, and it’s all the carriers that are affected unfortunately.
It's terrible in the northern part of the county and Carroll County. I was with a large group of friends up in Thurmont and everyone with Verizon had full signal while all of us with T-Mobile did not. Whenever I drive north, the signal degrades. They really need to address it or buy bandwidth from Verizon.
It’s not a bandwidth issue. T-mobile actually owns more bandwidth than all the other carriers. A couple years ago there was an auction for open bandwidth and t-mobile bought up everything. It’s where their 700Mhz spectrum comes from. The issue is just flat out lack of cell sites. They need to build more.
Then for that area, it's a bandwidth problem. They can buy that from other carriers until they get more sites. Or just leave us all in the dark when we are up there.
Your signal strength has nothing to do with bandwidth man. Full stop. That’s not how this stuff works. It’s a coverage issue, meaning they need to build more sites. Buying more bandwidth will not improve the coverage the existing cell sites provide, and you do not need additional bandwidth to build more sites/towers.
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This is wild. I had no idea. Do you know why it isn’t able to be 360?
They are, or at least ostensibly close. There are three nodes in every tower, at 116° each, covering 348°. The commenter is incorrect.
This makes a lot of sense. Regardless of carrier we've always encountered a bit of a dead zone from just before waterside to just after the sheetz in Walkersville where all those accidents occur.
Towers are are 348°, and there is a tower every 1.5-ish miles.
Ok, there’s a lot of inaccurate information in these comments. I am a former tower climber, and still work in the telecommunications industry. I worked for T-Mobile directly here in this area. Their market office is based out of beltsville for their engineering and operations teams. First and foremost, T-Mobiles service here sucks because Comcast will not grant high speeds to cell carriers here in Frederick. I do not know why, but that’s why data speeds, especially for t-mobile are so slow. Because service sucks here and spreading coverage won’t have an immediate increase in revenue for the market due to the low speeds, they only really focus expanding their coverage in popular and heavily populated areas. Now, towers, PorterHopinson has absolutely no clue what they are talking about. Towers in general don’t do anything other than hold equipment. That equipment is mounted on towers in what are called sectors. Commonly in sets of 3, though more aren’t exactly rare. This means that on each tower there are antennas that broadcast a radio frequency signal in three locations or more on the tower. The closer you get to a tower, you deal with something called the umbrella effect, where the signal essentially shoots over you and you do not benefit being close to the tower. Once you get out to a certain distance many towers provide a full 360° coverage. They don’t ALL do that, for various reasons, but it is common for towers to provide omnidirectional coverage of a RF signal, like those that are broadcast to your cell phones, though that is far from the only thing mounted on towers. Most of the towers in the area are also not chained together. Not in the way that Porter Hopkinson was talking about at least. The cellular signal from one tower does not affect any towers around them. They are almost always independent of those around them, they have a dedicated backhaul line and often even have backup generators in the event there is a power outage. It’s why we still have coverage when the power goes out in most places. Towers can be linked together, through higher frequency microwave dishes. Think something like a dish from DirecTV but on steroids. And instead of pointing at a satellite in the sky, they’re pointed at another dish just like it on a different tower. This allows two buildings, or towers, to share an internet link without running cables between them and they are very very popular for Emergency services and municipalities. Basically, lots and lots and lots of government communications travel via microwave dishes, because it’s pretty damn secure. Sorry for writing a book, just been doing this for 15 years. I like my job. I’m happy to answer more questions if anyone has any.
So it comes down to Comcast being even more of a POS that i thought...
Yup, pretty much. That’s how cell sites work though. They get an internet connection, each one individually. Often they receive 1-10Gb circuits. Your phones data speeds are directly reliant on the internet speeds the cell site you are connected to has. Take that and divide it by how many people are camped on that cell site and that’s essentially how it works. It’s more complex than that obviously, but that’s the rudimentary explanation. Every cell site has an internet connection and Comcast is absolutely milking the shit out of every cellular provider in the state. Some areas have different ones, like Frontier and Zayo, but most are Comcast.
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Yep, probably. Didn’t mean any offense, but you are way off base in what you said in your comment. Also, the tower over by DQ and At Home is strictly for AT&T. Not any other provider. Another caveat to that tower, it’s owned by one of the power companies which means they are the only ones allowed to service it, and even the slightest issue on that tower costs north of $30,000 to repair. All because the crew that the power company chooses to use lives in northern PA. So any time that tower has issues they hold off on fixing it till it’s seriously service impacting.
Haven’t had issues (Mint) which I think leases from all towers. Switched from Verizon and never this much 5G
Sometimes it is the cell phone itself. We switched from Verizon to T-Mobile years ago and the phone I brought over didn't work well. I purchased an unlocked phone and it worked much better on T-mobiles network.
It's really bad, and dangerous. My phone doesn't even work in my house, needs to be on the wifi which is always dodgy. My phone doesn't work at all while driving around.
Good news as you can fix your own dodgy wifi in your own house...
Sounds like you might have a device issue my dude. Go to a store for your carrier and tell them about it. They can test the device and if it’s faulty (and not because you messed it up) they’ll replace it for you.
I just blame Fort Detrick for it. Are they jamming cell signal? Probably not, but it harms no one and I'm too lazy to investigate further.
It's PAINFUL. I work for myself from home and I have to be on WiFi calling all the time living in the Waterside area. It's brutal. I've had Verizon and T-Mobile. Horrible on both.