- Joined
- Aug 17, 2010
- Messages
- 1,335
i work for a cell carrier, most of our builds are macro sites and very few small cells currently. i'm sure that will change when we build out mmwave, but for now well over 90 percent of our new builds are macros. There will be a need for macro sites for a long time outside of urban areas. MMwave does not have the range, and other band do not hold up well to large loads when compared to a macro. The biggest reason or empty towers is twofold. first is many carriers relo sites because they got a better deal nearby, often saving many times the cost to move over the life of the lease. second is the big tower companies built a bunch of towers several years ago in anticipation of carriers needing them for 5G but as stated in many cases they either elected to go with small cells or reworked other sites and decided not to add new ones. i know of a site SBA built about 5 years ago that to this day only has the light on it. we recently put a site up near it, the only thing i can figure is the deal was good enough that it was worth us waiting on the new tower to get built versus just going up on one less than a mile away in flat land so both have basically the same coverage potential. cell rent on a tower is several thousand a month, so carriers do look for the best trade off between cost and coverage. i have seen sites over 10k a month that reloed to a nearby site at less than 3k a month. basically in a year it pays or itself to move. Not to mention tower loading, newer radios are HEAVY and MIMO antennas are massive so the cost to mod a tower may be in the hundreds of thousands, much cheaper to move to a site with existing capacity or minimal mod needed than to do that!!!
