Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from pocketnow.com when you hit Send on your phone or when you try to access a webpage on your smart phone device or your tablet a lots happening involving cell phone towers and switches and networking and so much other advanced technical stuff today we got to tour exclusively the Verizon Wireless switch located somewhere in Southeast Pennsylvania can't even tell you where it is it's the brain of the Verizon network in this area it's where all of the cell phone towers connect to it's where everything happens when you hit Send or when you go to a web site on your device in this video we're going to show you exclusively some of the components of that system we're going to find out a lot of information about how Verizon Wireless is system works and how cell phone systems work in general it's going to be interesting let's get to it so we are about to enter the switch room and Dan's going to tell us a little bit about what we're going to see inside inside switch room - you're going to see a 3G digital stylus which along with a ecp complex also in this room is our we call our distribution center which is a data transport which handles all the internet calls we hear and our sister site located in a region we also going to take a tour of the LTE equipment for the new network and deployed in the last year so this is the 3G equipment in here 3gn forging and for use in this room got it so you make a call it goes to the tower it goes up to the cloud down to this place and then into this room basically is that it is a choice of here or one of two sites two sites got it and how does the how does that get determined which site it goes to just traffic and yeah it's very loud but hopefully what are all these boxes in these rows behind me is a 3G equipment that I mentioned this is the climbing complexes so those are for 3G data behind 3G data the waste and data what is it about CDMA where you can't make a call and be on the web at the same time well BMA world one per game porgy over LTE right right and so voice over LTE is going to be a big deal certainly will be which over ideas a common practice today right so bright pain that ever signs on the hand we face baby voiceover LTE the processing cow which streamline which a ride LTE great any estimated year rollout for voice over LTE we had Lowell McAdam and made right that we made apparently it's very crisp and clear have you heard voiceover LTE yourself and personally I have not what has been described to me is it's more of boys over IP eight hi have background noise it does that without hardware it's because you can do newest cancellation with a phone that has two two microphones what you're saying voice over LTE dynamically reduces background the best correct that's amazing very good so so what is inside of all of these things a lot of stuff that's not multiple servers it must require a lot of power to make all this run yes actually later Natur we're going to tour the battery backup systems this is uh this is our voicemail platform voicemail subscriber it is not in service call so there are a lot of hard drives in there basically reporting there's a so so these four boxes cover voicemail for this region now this voicemail box actually covers what Regents does this building serve when you're building the distribution center actually covers from Delaware to New Jersey for the future so so if I'm in Delaware and I make a phone call on a Verizon phone it's likely that it's getting crowded through here 50/50 chances and there's another facility so my call goes to where in this room first for example that's that's not easy to explain I mean there's multiple different scenarios you will layer so it depends on time of day traffic that's what you're doing thanks like making the call from Delaware I'm calling my grandma in California the call arrives here and then what happens to the call to connect grandma's phone we then connect to our distributions it'd be routed to are you use the so how often to someone come in here and change the switches and unplug stuff Weston consoles are always were always doing so if you wanted to increase the amount of users that can be I don't know making a fall one-time or be online at one time does someone come in here and move some things around now doing it do it at night but you would come here to an emergency scenario and so the technicians are sort of watching from another location maybe within this building some data on a screen to see that the health of the network and what's going on for said what if they see something pop off they come down here and they make it make an adjustment right I would say I'd have his current LTE devices can do 10 20 megabits per second down if you wanted to go to a hundred where where would that change happen is that like a switch in here in all like multiple places I would really would be it won't be in here but it would also be and and why not just turn that on today I mean what's what's keeping you you know at a certain speed until you go to the next speed because if you turn up the speeds on there might be some problems so in terms of the hardware what is the heart what needs happen with the hardware to go from 20 megabits per second to 150 years so LTE and specification does allow you to get to those and 100 eggs I went to normal yes to our change that have to one of the bigger issues is the hardware itself bikes 4j devices today vanished to achieve the maximum they actually say 40m taxes of the OEMs to come out with hardware that has before it a canyon in ten low cost of manufacturing and right now is that lte-advanced now healthy and what are the theoretical maximum speeds of lte-advanced it's got to be pretty pretty oh it has to be so do you do you hear RV is actually our network so this is the LTE correct the embarrasses of this network another hard layer protection what's different about this equipment than the 3G equipment that makes LTE so much faster the equipment different how is the equipment different it's just new technology baby hurry everyone actually back to the issue that we just talked about there are seems that around here peak benefits the key differences earlier is he that's right there is they're out there that's how we're able to realize so LT is really a combination of technologies that allow for faster speeds absolutely so we are in the battery room and everything you just saw is sped out of this room off of DC power so these batteries and liquid are constantly being charged and then discharged the reason that they do this stand is when we lose commercial power the facility has a way for a so there's there's two levels it goes a battery power then it goes the generator power if the main power goes down because of whatever he's heading even in the worst case scenario it's another layer of protection for several hours so so that was giving my next function how long did his battery last for several hours below so all of these batteries can feed everything that happened in that other room that's what I mean is it this is one of Ultimo better so what are the other benefits of having your own power supply here with these batteries feeding the other room well as we talked about electrons anybody that's been in home and I understand you have your fluctuations power when you see what go away on vacation they tell you to turn everything off the applause the need is not filter this design of it helps the longevity of the equipment that we saw in the other but it is a great alternative where everything comes through and makes for a more cost got it so it improves the longevity of the equipment and also does it help in any other ways helps with stability as well yeah those pickups that you see out there I don't know what the end result would be what would the design that we have here it eliminates any as you can see we are in a much quieter generator room where obviously if the power's lost those batteries discharged then they need more power these things turn on right they actually power on by themselves automatically obviously trades for prints for power to our to our DC power tonight so both of these there are two of them in here both of these would turn on or would they one would turn on and then load of not needed one will shut down so kind of intelligently manages Wow kind of an engine guy you know how much horsepower is this eggs are quite loud with her right you can't be here without I hear - you love to put one of those in a car yeah really big car so in terms of power management every cell phone tower or most cell phone towers have their own generating system that is correct approximately 85% of our towers have generators - so while everyone of them is designed with battery backup and they are designed for eight hours of support they also have diesel generators in there the reason for the delta between naught and 100% is there are certain towers that might be on top of a building might be on structures that cannot accommodate that so we put a lot of effort a lot of time and effort and planning into making sure that our network stays up and is reliable so we are about to enter the control room although we're going to keep the camera off what is inside the control room inside the controller is where we monitor all the systems that we just toured in the embassy so there will be lots of computer screens monitoring lots of data rack yeah we see real-time information on ours how our equipment is performing and if there's any issues we can react to them accordingly dispatch your cell technicians cell towers as so people are in here monitoring it 24/7 basically edit this this room is moderate handle 24 by 7 and also we have our network operations control center can you speak to what data they're looking at what stats they're looking out for in order to respond to problem the performance of the whole network got it the law is amount of a network engineer very good so I've got some cell phone tower questions for you things I think most people have wondered when they place a call on their phone when they go to a website on their phone I guess the the first question would be in the design of the cell phone tower they're all the same height it seems is that is that accurate to say um vary between 100 feet to right and and most of them at the top or all of them have these what looked like tentacles and sometimes there are multiple levels of tentacles I know that's a horrible way of explaining them what what are they and what is their function there's multiple array of antennas and if you see different like you said layers of them I guess typically it's a co-located site like Harry mentioned earlier Souls have on this tower outside you have Verizon Wireless you have ITT I think metro pcs right as well so is there is there a more favorable position like the bottom tentacles are better than the top no I mean that typically the higher the better in row where is from welcoming the higher you can see the more you cover all right but I mean the difference is in ten feet so it's not much difference got it and can you explain what happens when I press send on my phone when I make a call from transmission of the signal to the tower and then what happens after that what dependent service we're talking about but for a 3G service essentially the cell site axes is relatively dumb so it'll just send whatever you're requesting on to as Dan mentioned the RNC 3 video or for one action to come back to the switching office and it will determine what you're allowed to do if you're allowed to have that service for example right it'll assign you what we call a traffic channel to allow you to start talking and it will relay that back to the cell site and it will send that to you have a call for G the sites are little more intelligent they do a lot of that on their own and that's part of the reason why weeks one of the many reasons why it's faster interesting and that all happens in a second which is amazing all the time what determines how many calls can be placed on a tower at the same time would be the amount of spectrum are using their allocated in chunks we deploy them based on the needs in the area so if we're talking about a state of environment will allocate all of our spectrum there we're talking about a roller environment with those fewer users will allocate less and you know as we see the need increase we allocate more and that's basically a limiting factor and is there a way to increase the amount of simultaneous calls on a tower or is it just a matter of putting up more towers oh no no there's definitely ways to increase there's a lot of sophisticated algorithms that we can deploy that will dynamically shift the traffic traffic how its utilized that kind of thing of course adding a tower will add a lot more capacity but there's a lot of ways to do it within the Clemente hub and in terms of cell phone tower placement you see them more than ever these days sometimes they're disguised as trees which is always funny to see are these placed strategically based on you know company anticipates they're going to be X amount of collars here X amount of cars there or is there like some formula you use to say they need to be spread one or two miles apart in order to achieve a certain result it depends on the goal of the site so for example we have rural sites that we just want to provide coverage and those can serve for miles many miles sometimes right um so we'll put them into Pat weep so we have tools that will estimate propagation of different sites so if it's the goal of that area is to serve just provide coverage we'll just run that simulation and determine where we went into town or we start the search process for a tower there in the city it's more frequently a capacity concern right so we find the most loaded sites and we determine how the best way to offload them would be typically by deploying those like it's combination of factors do you foresee a future where cellphone towers are no longer needed maybe the phone can communicate with a satellite it has enough power to beam up to a satellite and the satellite beams down to a data center or do you think we'll always have to have cell phone towers uh well I would say towers are going to be the way to go future uh they're getting smaller there's new technologies that are going to allow us to have more of them and not need a big piece of land or have to rent a space or even smaller towers many cells if you could have an atom for example you want to see a lot of the towers there you know 20 feet high and there's a building for example right you often see them on billboards sometimes and sides of buildings very interesting yeah the deployment of towers is our last resort I mean like I said there's lots of ways we can enhance coverage and capacity with what we have today so we typically go through all those steps before we say okay now we have to go into place so you don't want to have to avoid you want to avoid building Tower because it's disruptive to the area it's expensive there's lots of opposition to seeing towers people whose backyard can you give me an estimation whether it's in the tens hundreds or thousands of how many calls a cell phone tower can handle it's the one thousand interesting I'm not sure what the perception is out there but that's that's interesting and is that the same for data it can accept potentially thousands of data connections at one time or is that lower oh you know it's thousands of voice those and thousands of data calls is interesting and well LTE voice over LTE when that becomes available will that increase the amount of people that can carry out a phone call in one tower yeah that's the whole idea is you get a lot more capacity games from whatever I feed because of the nature of points of right so tell me about spectrum I think I think some people understand that some people don't you know a long time ago Verizon won the auction for the 700 megahertz spectrum which is what does that mean 7r mega-rich is is a it's the frequency range right so we operate in within 10 megahertz well 20 makers total the 10 megahertz on one one way in the seventh megahertz spectrum so your voice is at a certain spectrum when you talk your your house phone is a certain spectrum and your cell phones now I'm going to be at the 4G phone we'll be at the seminar members so so spectrum back to physics class is the frequency of the wave that your phone creates right and so is lower better is higher better fundamentally fundamentally lower is better in terms of the propagation so you because kind of like a a subwoofer has a lower frequency you can go through things so lower frequency is better so 700 megahertz has good what's the word penetration through walls and other structures like that and so there recently was more news about Verizon buying spectrum what's what's that about exciting news yeah we talked about spectrum and we talked about the ability to be able to support higher bandwidths more spectrum means you know more bandwidth higher speeds we were able to secure additional spectrum with the partnership that we are forming with Comcast where they were able to free up spectrum for us we spent 3.6 billion dollars to be able to increase that capacity in about 75% of the country we're able to grow by another 20 megahertz putting us in a better position to handle not only the needs of 2012 but deep into you know future years so can you talk a little bit about the adoption rates of smartphones and how many people are using smartphones in terms of percentage of overall users great question and that number continues to climb but the last statistic that I have seen is talking about that smartphones there's over 40 percent penetration of smartphones meaning that over 40 percent of those that have cell phones are using smartphones one of the interesting trends that we're seeing today is many of those customers are migrating now to the latest generation which is the 4G LTE smartphones there have been improvements in that space in terms of battery life overall capabilities which is an amazing thing because you think about the 4G smartphones they're now coming with front-facing cameras to be able to support video chat that is something that's a growing demand that's out there it does increase the overall usage which is one of the reasons why we are working real hard to stay ahead that demand and if I'm a new user and I want to get a smartphone for the first time it's very likely that I'll pay that a little bit of extra first time investment to get the 4G smartphone because caught the cost of ownership long term between a 4G know 3d smartphone is very similar great point but let me off set that is terms of the equipment itself yes you may realize a premium for the 4G and those capabilities with the increased and you know two cameras on the device what we have done though is we have a promotion that's on right now called double your data if you buy a 4G smartphone you get twice as much usage for the same amount of money that makes sense so the total cost of ownership actually when you look at it that way is either a wash or better with 4G and it helps that 4G technologies are more efficient on your ends that was one of the keys that's how we're able to extend that benefit to the customer so that was a look at the switch I hope you enjoyed it very technical stuff certainly but hopefully give you a better idea of what happens when you press send on your phone and that calls connected in two or three seconds it's pretty amazing the engineering that goes into cell phone network technology of today if you like this video please give us a thumbs up and thanks for watching that's it for now you