One of the cellular vendors wants to install a 180 foot monopole antenna in our neighborhood. They claim that there is significant growth in LTE consumers. So in order to better serve the customers they need to install a new monopole. Following are two reasons that they provided recently.

  • The current towers are over capacity thus cannot reliably serve the consumers
  • The cellular signal is weak therefore consumers cannot make phone calls

Question: What are the alternate ways to solve this problem beside installing a new monopole? Are there new LTE/Cellular technology that can help reduce cell tower capacity as well as permit the consumer to make phone calls reliably using cells phones? What are any future technology that might address this issue?

  • $\begingroup$ I suspect the real question here is "How can I stop a cellphone company installing a 180 foot monopole where I think it will affect my life in some way?" That isn't an engineering question, but it might be a legal one. $\endgroup$ – alephzero Dec 16 '16 at 22:14
  • $\begingroup$ @alephzero: Especially since this subject is the only thing this user asks about. $\endgroup$ – Wasabi Dec 17 '16 at 1:03

US base Cellular vendors (Such as Verizon, Sprint, AT&T) in combination with cell phone manufactures are starting to introduce a technology call Carrier-branded wifi calling. This is similar to Skype, Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, except the phone dialer is integrated to the smartphone's wifi radio. So the cellular connection is weak, then the phone will automatically switch over to Wifi-Calling.

Note as I understand the LTE uses VoIP (VoLTE) to make the call. Skype like services use VoIP. This is an integration of both wifi and cellular technologies. Depending of the wifi connection the consumer is likely to experience better voice quality. Currently a VoIP call will requires about 1MB/minute of data for a voice call. The typical video call will take about 6-8 MB/minute of data for a video call.

As consumers move over to Wifi calling the need for cellular towers will decrease thus will be used for true mobile connectivity. Thus the residential consumer will less depend on cell phone towers.



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