City of Dallas LTE Brag

[w4amp]

Utilizing MCPTT over FirstNet and Verizon ‘best decision I’ve made,' Georgia police chief says

I guess it is all puppy's and rainbows.

 

[MTS2000des]

Interesting because Dallas is one of the first cities in Paulding to join the new Paulding TRS. The only PTT over cellular will be Smart Connect.

He must not talk to his officers because I've heard otherwise about the reliability of that setup. I wouldn't trust Verizon and their "1 bar army" to order a pizza let alone MCPTT. FirstNet is better but you're still just another customer on someone else' network. It's all good until it isn't.

My favorite part of this puff piece:
Of course, one significant concern for all customers of FirstNet—the nationwide public-safety broadband network (NPSBN) being built and maintained by AT&T—was the significant outage suffered by the carrier on Feb. 22. This episode caused Duvall to opt for leveraging the dual-SIM capability in the L3Harris XL portables with Verizon Frontline connectivity as a backup.

“Through FirstNet, I’ve got phenomenal coverage everywhere,” Duvall said. “The only reason we went with Verizon and L3Harris BeOn as a redundancy is the mere fact that FirstNet had that big outage last year. This way, if something went down [in the FirstNet system], we can just turn a button, and a few seconds later, we’ll be on L3Harris BeOn through Verizon.

“We had the Verizon Frontline and L3Harris BeOn by the end of last summer or early last fall. Since then, we’ve had the capability to just switch from one channel for AT&T and switch over to another to go to Verizon.”

So chief, if the almighty FirstNet fell to it's knees, you think Verizon fares any better? Dozens of outages reported on their swiss cheese of a network.

Meanwhile, our P25 systems remain up and thanks to ISSI and cross programming, we're never "out of range". I hope you bought 700/800 on those L3H radios so you can have them programmed up on the new Paulding system. You'll need it when the next cyber attack takes out the telecom cartels' feeble networks. Or just call up the hams out there.

 

[buddrousa]

First net sites here are over 20 miles apart not like Memphis Nashville heck he might as well be in Atlanta where you have ATT Sites every couple of miles apart. Try 1st Net in Rural America. The sells person came to our station and ask could he have our wifi password to demo 1st net.

 

[MTS2000des]

Verizon in Atlanta is as weak as trying to hear a 250 watt AM station 50 miles away during the day. Zero in building coverage in MIDTOWN and barely enough to hold a VoLTE session on the street. I wouldn't bet a tick's life on their limp network here, let alone in rural Georgia. On the 575 corridor in Helen, once you leave the highway, Verizon is non-existent, AT&T is like -120dbm. T-Mobile, OTOH has lit up the area with band N71 but still there are places up in them thar hills that it doesn't get.

 

[kf4lhp]

Meanwhile, our P25 systems remain up and thanks to ISSI and cross programming, we're never "out of range". I hope you bought 700/800 on those L3H radios so you can have them programmed up on the new Paulding system. You'll need it when the next cyber attack takes out the telecom cartels' feeble networks. Or just call up the hams out there.

You'll also need it when a tornado tears across your area and tears down all of that aerial fiber the carriers use for backhaul. Meanwhile, my microwave backhaul will never miss a beat.

 

[BinaryMode]

You'll also need it when a tornado tears across your area and tears down all of that aerial fiber the carriers use for backhaul. Meanwhile, my microwave backhaul will never miss a beat.

Off topic a bit, but why on earth would a carrier use aerial fiber for backhual?

In my neck of the woods it's mostly buried as it should be.

And a small soap box rant if you will. Places like Florida that have hurricanes not ever 25 years but every season should have all utilities buried. Ya know? A small tax limited by say 5 years or so could pay for it.

I just find it weird that fiber carrying loads and loads of precious data would sit on a pole. Especially since my dad used to bury this stuff for years in places of nothing but wheat and meadowlarks. Yeah, different geography and logistics, but still. Heck, the Air Force knows this fundamental fact for missile silos...

 

[kf4lhp]

Off topic a bit, but why on earth would a carrier use aerial fiber for backhual?

In my neck of the woods it's mostly buried as it should be.

And a small soap box rant if you will. Places like Florida that have hurricanes not ever 25 years but every season should have all utilities buried. Ya know? A small tax limited by say 5 years or so could pay for it.

I just find it weird that fiber carrying loads and loads of precious data would sit on a pole. Especially since my dad used to bury this stuff for years in places of nothing but wheat and meadowlarks. Yeah, different geography and logistics, but still. Heck, the Air Force knows this fundamental fact for missile silos...

$$$$$ - and time.

There are two cell sites up the road from me. Everything around here is just a few inches of topsoil, then rock. Aerial is cheaper and faster to deploy. Then there is a railroad mainline and a creek to span, and I'm sure aerial is far less expensive in that circumstance as well.

All that said, there's always the infamous backhoe fade for buried fiber, and I'd be stunned if any carrier were using diverse routing from an individual cell site.

 

[mmckenna]

Off topic a bit, but why on earth would a carrier use aerial fiber for backhual?

In my neck of the woods it's mostly buried as it should be.

And a small soap box rant if you will. Places like Florida that have hurricanes not ever 25 years but every season should have all utilities buried. Ya know? A small tax limited by say 5 years or so could pay for it.

I just find it weird that fiber carrying loads and loads of precious data would sit on a pole. Especially since my dad used to bury this stuff for years in places of nothing but wheat and meadowlarks. Yeah, different geography and logistics, but still. Heck, the Air Force knows this fundamental fact for missile silos...

Usually it's a loop. Fiber makes a loop with the ability to self heal. So a cut at one point won't necessarily kill everything. But it does happen. We are on a couple of regional paths and some of it is aerial. We do sometimes take hits, but path diversity and loops usually just make it an alarm that pops up and a minor annoyance/loss of path diversity. More often than not, it's rodent damage on sections that have not been upgraded. A few traffic accidents, and less common is weather damage. Since the aerial paths often use the electric utility poles, the trees are well trimmed back.
But the outages are usually pretty short. Since there's a lot of customers on the cable, response is pretty fast and the techs are really good. Our cable plant engineer usually shoots the cable from our end looking back to the POP and sends the distance to fault direct to them. They do the same thing from their side and can usually narrow the fault down to one or two poles, if it's not obvious.

Underground construction is expensive if there isn't already a path. It is ideal, but we don't always get what we want. And it's not without faults. The above mentioned "Back Hoe Fade" is usually the challenge. Cars hitting the boxes is the other one. Back when I briefly worked for one of the carriers, the cable ran along railroad right of ways underground. A derailment would often damage the cable.

And then sometimes the energized conductor drops and hits the support strand on the way down. That sometimes lights the cable jacket on fire, then your lineman become aerial fire fighters:

 

[mikewazowski]

Usually it's a loop. Fiber makes a loop with the ability to self heal. So a cut at one point won't necessarily kill everything. But it does happen. We are on a couple of regional paths and some of it is aerial. We do sometimes take hits, but path diversity and loops usually just make it an alarm that pops up and a minor annoyance/loss of path diversity. More often than not, it's rodent damage on sections that have not been upgraded. A few traffic accidents, and less common is weather damage. Since the aerial paths often use the electric utility poles, the trees are well trimmed back.
But the outages are usually pretty short. Since there's a lot of customers on the cable, response is pretty fast and the techs are really good. Our cable plant engineer usually shoots the cable from our end looking back to the POP and sends the distance to fault direct to them. They do the same thing from their side and can usually narrow the fault down to one or two poles, if it's not obvious.

Underground construction is expensive if there isn't already a path. It is ideal, but we don't always get what we want. And it's not without faults. The above mentioned "Back Hoe Fade" is usually the challenge. Cars hitting the boxes is the other one. Back when I briefly worked for one of the carriers, the cable ran along railroad right of ways underground. A derailment would often damage the cable.

I can fix an aerial fiber that's damaged far quicker than I can a buried fiber. I've seen many backhoe fades, construction workers taking out lines with augers, pedestals hit by cars, etc, etc. Once the fiber has been delashed, the splicers are pretty quick. Much quicker to delash a cable with a few bucket trucks then waiting for excavation equipment.

In some cases where we bring a fiber ring into a site, we bring one side in buried and the other side aerial.

Each method has it's place and one is not better than the other.

 

[mmckenna]

Makes sense. I'm about 25 years out from what fiber training I had. I know the industry has changed a lot.

 

[Cameron314]

Off topic a bit, but why on earth would a carrier use aerial fiber for backhual?

In my neck of the woods it's mostly buried as it should be.

And a small soap box rant if you will. Places like Florida that have hurricanes not ever 25 years but every season should have all utilities buried. Ya know? A small tax limited by say 5 years or so could pay for it.

I just find it weird that fiber carrying loads and loads of precious data would sit on a pole. Especially since my dad used to bury this stuff for years in places of nothing but wheat and meadowlarks. Yeah, different geography and logistics, but still. Heck, the Air Force knows this fundamental fact for missile silos...

I think this is likely a common misconception for those not who don't work in this industry but our underground takes about double the number of hits that our aerial does per mile. I know it's not just us, that is pretty common across the industry.

 

[Project25_MASTR]

You'll also need it when a tornado tears across your area and tears down all of that aerial fiber the carriers use for backhaul. Meanwhile, my microwave backhaul will never miss a beat.

Wish I could say that about mine. Piss poor engineering and overbuilding. 6 ft dishes constantly moving...towers overloaded and swaying too much for those 6 ft dishes. I actually narrowed down the channel width and reduced the modulation scheme at one site to reliably pass 15 Mbps and Motorola came back at me saying they can't push updates anymore. Motorola, why do we need a 150 Mbps link on a system that pulls less than 1 Mbps? Oh, so you can push Windows updates to the four MCC7500's which all have dedicated MPLS connections back to the core but you want to push that out over the microwave network which has had nothing but reliability issues since you began repalcing the PTP800s?

I actually dumbfounded our CSM as I canceled an upgrade project in it's entirety simply because I can't justify a quarter million dollar links that are being nothing but problematic.

 

[ThreatLevelMidnight]

Verizon in Atlanta is as weak as trying to hear a 250 watt AM station 50 miles away during the day. Zero in building coverage in MIDTOWN and barely enough to hold a VoLTE session on the street. I wouldn't bet a tick's life on their limp network here, let alone in rural Georgia. On the 575 corridor in Helen, once you leave the highway, Verizon is non-existent, AT&T is like -120dbm. T-Mobile, OTOH has lit up the area with band N71 but still there are places up in them thar hills that it doesn't get.

Is This Multiple Devices? I Have Had Great Success With Verizon All Over The Metro. Phone, Tablet, Watch, and Mobile Router.

 

[MTS2000des]

Is This Multiple Devices? I Have Had Great Success With Verizon All Over The Metro. Phone, Tablet, Watch, and Mobile Router.

Come to many parts of Smyrna, Marietta (including Whitcher street at Kennestone), heck they can't even put a usable signal at my shop at FTY.
Verizon is the 1-bar army of limp coverage. Yes, multiple devices on multiple accounts. They suck.

 

[ThreatLevelMidnight]

Come to many parts of Smyrna, Marietta (including Whitcher street at Kennestone), heck they can't even put a usable signal at my shop at FTY.
Verizon is the 1-bar army of limp coverage. Yes, multiple devices on multiple accounts. They suck.

Thats Bizarre...