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Mobile network mast powered by diesel generator

Hi,
While cycling around my town I found a mobile network mast powered by two diesel generators: https://ibb.co/HKJPcSp The whole site looks like a temporary installation but it is there for a quite long time now. It is about 300 yards from country road where pole with transformer stands. I am wondering how reliable/profitable and common country wide it is.
 
They probably can't get the planning permission to lay power cabling, sadly NIMBYs in regards to mobile mast start moaning about the diesel generators but then moan about construction happening.
 
I believe it's a common thing in "the sticks".. many run like this year-round in difficult areas and get their backhaul via satellite.
 
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Isn't that LPG on the box in the right? The red sticker on it looks very much like it. Of course many diesel gennies can run on LPG too. But its easier to store than Diesel I guess (Diesel lasts 12 months without fuel additives)

It does look like a temp site. Is it on cellmapper?
 
Isn't that LPG on the box in the right? The red sticker on it looks very much like it. Of course many diesel gennies can run on LPG too. But its easier to store than Diesel I guess (Diesel lasts 12 months without fuel additives)

It does look like a temp site. Is it on cellmapper?
It is on cellmapper:

and it smells like diesel.
 
Any big events going on locally? Or set to go on locally? Could it be in preparation or left over from one. Quite normal for large festivals / events for addition temporary cell towers to be put up to deal with the increased number of devices in the area as the crowds arrive - calls / texts / internet access.
I remember the good old days (20+ years ago mind) as a student in Cardiff on a rugby international day - the cell would be filled up with devices and became impossible to make calls and send texts for the day.
 
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It could be part of EE's ESN. They might be trying to boost coverage in preparation for handover, the diesel might be temporary till they do the civils to get power up there.
 
It could be part of EE's ESN. They might be trying to boost coverage in preparation for handover, the diesel might be temporary till they do the civils to get power up there.
It is there since 2016 and belongs to Three not EE.
 
Interesting discussion. Here in the sticks we have a good mobile network through a mast which is powered from a link to a local farm, on whose land the mast stands.
With the pending switch to digital phone services and the switch off of PSTN it means that if we have a local power failure we will lose the digital voice service and, at the same time, mobiles will not work through the mast. While there are stop gap services they all seem to be of relatively short duration.
Does anyone have experience of requesting a standby generator for a rural mast to ensure it continues to work? It is a Vodafone mast.
 
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Interesting discussion. Here in the sticks we have a good mobile network through a mast which is powered from a link to a local farm, on whose land the mast stands.
With the pending switch to digital phone services and the switch off of PSTN it means that if we have a local power failure we will lose the digital voice service and, at the same time, mobiles will not work through the mast. While there are stop gap services they all seem to be of relatively short duration.
Does anyone have experience of requesting a standby generator for a rural mast to ensure it continues to work? It is a Vodafone mast.

You can by all means ask what the arrangements are for power backup for your mast, but don't be disappointed when they don't tell you. I would imagine the only way you will be able to encourage a mobile company to ensure specific masts have appropriate power contingency arrangements would be to ensure some critical national infrastructure is dependent upon the service from that cell site and that organisation has a corporate account with the network providing that mast and considerable influence.
 
You can by all means ask what the arrangements are for power backup for your mast, but don't be disappointed when they don't tell you. I would imagine the only way you will be able to encourage a mobile company to ensure specific masts have appropriate power contingency arrangements would be to ensure some critical national infrastructure is dependent upon the service from that cell site and that organisation has a corporate account with the network providing that mast and considerable influence.
As far as I have been told those operators providing comms to the emergency services, will not be offering the same to ordinary customers. So just because vodafone "power" certain services does not mean they will provide you with service in an emergency. The only real way we will know if they truely do have a backup is in an emergency situation! Some planning permissions have backup power supplies mentioned but it does not indicate what exactly will be backed up in a power cut. In reality, it will probably be strictly emergency calls & Emergency Broadcast Messages only mode until power is re-established.
 
VHF (or even a CB) radio folks. Anyone with a farming background will know how handy they are.
 
My dad was radio ham, hence the wind up tower and I have somewhere a Midland AM CB set and a hand held FM CB, but there is no-one on it. The AM set is illegal to use as far as I know and the FM might be as well (barely goes a few miles any-ways).

Don't want to try it out given the increased activity in the area recently either!

 
As far as I have been told those operators providing comms to the emergency services, will not be offering the same to ordinary customers. So just because vodafone "power" certain services does not mean they will provide you with service in an emergency. The only real way we will know if they truely do have a backup is in an emergency situation! Some planning permissions have backup power supplies mentioned but it does not indicate what exactly will be backed up in a power cut. In reality, it will probably be strictly emergency calls & Emergency Broadcast Messages only mode until power is re-established.
You're right to flag the emergency services do have the MTPAS option to have a flag on their SIM cards to give priority access to the event of network congestion or the network is put into a mode where business as usual is compromised and restrictions are put on normal network access.

Whilst I am not an expert in this area I would however expect that more than 90% of the power requirement to keep a cell site alive is just to keep the equipment running and providing any service at all, and a very small percentage of the power load is traffic/consumption related. With more processing at the edge done in 5G compared to 4G, there would be a slight uptick in traffic/consumption based power use between the two standards.

So whilst a network could be put into hobbled mode to only accept requests from MTPAS SIMs I would not expect that to result in a significant power saving.

Dialling down the available service to disable 5G/4G and reduce service to 3G or lower if that were technically possible may have some limited power savings to keep a minimum service running for longer, whether the equipment has been architected and designed with this in mind is another question. And if it would be desirable where data is probably more important than voice and SMS is debatable.
 
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