Infrastructure - Telecommunications
How are cell calls managed in Bridlemile?
Two local cell towers receive and transmit Bridlemile cell phone calls.
The bigger tower (100 feet) stands just north of the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, west of SW 45th Avenue, and adjacent to the Glencullen Electric Substation. It carries 4G-LTE signals for AT&T and Verizon.
The tower’s owner is Goldenstate Towers LLC. It was constructed in 1996 and started operating in 1997. Goldenstate Towers is a subsidiary of Crown Castle, which has a network of over 40,000 cell towers.
The second tower is shorter than the first one. It stands about two blocks east of the first tower, and also just north of Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway. It carries 4G-LTE signals for T-Mobile.
Sources: Cellmapper.net and AntennaeSearch.com. Enter “Bridlemile” as the search location. Also, Wikipedia-Crown Castle .
How do you receive Internet and streaming services in Bridlemile?
When you watch TV or use a computer to access the internet, you likely communicate with the outside world via a fiber optic network. In case of a streaming service, perhaps your house still has a coaxial cable – or even a DSL telephone line. However, increasingly, for much of the journey between the destination data center and your computer or TV, the information travels by way of fiber optic cables.
For phone calls with destinations beyond Bridlemile, the router at the base of the cell tower passes signals from and to the local phones to their destination via a fiber optic backbone that stretches around the world. If the receiving phone is also a cellular one, then from there the calls may travel to the cell tower of the receiving cell phone and from there to the receiving cell phone.
How to find and ID telecom artifacts in Bridlemile?
Utility poles:
Find artifacts of Bridlemile telecommunications on utility poles, where telecom cables sit on the middle part (~third) of a utility pole. They are located several feet below the power cables, which occupy the upper part (~third) of the pole. That lets the telecommunications workers maintain their communications lines without having to interact with the higher-powered and more dangerous power lines.
Telephone wires:
In Bridlemile, you can recognize the land-line phone lines on utility poles because they are generally the thickest cables. They are thick because they have to hold four twisted-pair copper wires per household – and until recently many local households had telephone lines connected to their homes. For historical reasons (they’re older), they are usually located above coaxial and fiber optic cables.
Also, utility-pole phone lines are usually black on their outside (insulation). And they typically have a cylindrical or rectangle black junction box on every couple of poles.
The telephone company installs (or used to install) interface boxes from their lines to the outside of houses. They are typically gray, but sometimes home owners paint them to match the color of their houses.
Telephone lines can provide DSL internet service.
Coaxial cables:
The easiest way to recognize coaxial cables on utility poles is to look for their trapezoidal indentations (aka “expansion loops” or “tension loops” (see below)). These are dipped areas in the cable. They let the cables expand in extreme weather conditions. Coax cables are also skinnier than telephone lines.
For longer distance communications, telecoms use hybrid coaxial cable-to-fiber optic cable systems. Find these by looking for wavey metallic node boxes, which hand off signals to the speedier, newer longer-distance fiber.
Steel cases with straight-slotted vents on the side are typically amplifiers to help power coaxial signals over longer distances. They differ from the hybrid coax-to-fiber boxes as their vents are straight while the hybrid ones are wavey.
Also, coax cable lines connect with distinct, small cable tap boxes. Tap boxes connect the main coaxial cable with a separate line that goes to your or to another customer’s residence.
Fiber optic cables:
The easiest way to recognize fiber-optic cables on utility poles is to look for devices with a circular-triangular shape, each of which looks like a snow shoe (see below). Telecomms use these snow-shoe-loops to wrap extra fiber cable back and forth on. They are more formally called “aerial storage fiber units”.
For more information: Fiber Optic Snowshoes .
You can also recognize fiber optic cables because they sometimes come with loops of cable.
And they are black on the outside and are frequently are marked with colored, spiral wraps and flags. For example, there are reddish-orange flags or wrappers or bands.
They are also relatively thin like coaxial cable. However, fiber optic cables do not have the indented expansion loops that characterize coaxial cables nor as many long cylindrical boxes used with coaxial cables.
Lines also have fiber splice cases to connect fiber optic cables. One way to distinguish these from phone line splice cases is the fiber ones typically have more rounded ends than the phone ones.
Sometimes, the telecommunications company will Zip-tie the fiber optic and the coaxial cables or telephone cables together. This might make identifying each cable type more complicated. However, the distinct snow-shoes of the fiber optic cables and the expansion loops of the coaxial cables and the thick telephone lines can help ID each type cable even if they are physically bundled together.
Who Owns the 5G Cellular Towers?