Cell towers only transmit around 10 watts usually. Sometimes up to 50 or so in urban areas. Your phone can transmit up to 2 watts. antenna gain depends on losses and diversity gain (Sphere/beam coverage) Contact online >>
Cell towers only transmit around 10 watts usually. Sometimes up to 50 or so in urban areas. Your phone can transmit up to 2 watts. antenna gain depends on losses and diversity gain (Sphere/beam coverage)
We present the energy consumption of DSL, HFC networks, passive optical networks, fiber to the node, point-to-point optical systems, UMTS (W-CDMA), and WiMAX. Optical access networks are the most energy efficient of the available access technologies.
A typical 5G base station consumes up to twice or more the power of a 4G base station, writes MTN Consulting Chief Analyst Matt Walker in a new report entitled "Operators facing power cost crunch." And energy costs can grow even more at higher frequencies, due to a need for more antennas and a denser layer of small cells.
But with more than 400,000 cell tower sites in the US alone, they outnumber data centers and their power footprint totals a not-insubstantial 21 million megawatt hours (MWh) of power per year. As energy prices soar, ESG continues to grow in importance, and 5G''s increased power demands loom, a number of cell tower owners and telco operators
I want links to references if possible.
First of all, you have a misconception about GSM, 3G, 4G:
The frequency bands you list are some of the frequency allocations for these networks. These are different between different operators and in different countries.
Then: Cellular networks are not broadcast transmitters. They don''t work with constant output powers.
The power they transmit depends on what they need to achieve. As noted in the comments above, a cell tower that covers a huge rural area will blast out more power per user on average than a small-cell tower in a city centre.
Since power consumption is one of the biggest costs in operating a mobile network, carriers are extremely interested in keeping transmit power as low as possible.
Also, lower maximum transmit power allows for smaller coverage area – this sounds like an anti-feature, but it means that the next base station using the exact same frequencies can be closer, which becomes necessary as operators strive to serve very many users in densely populated areas, and thus need to divide these users among as many base stations as possible, to even be theoretically able to serve the cumulative data rate of these.
Then, as mentioned, the transmissions will be exactly as strong as necessary to offer optimal (under some economic definition of "optimal") service to the subscribers. Which means: when there are only a few devices basically idling in the cell, the power output will be orders of magnitude less than when the network is crowded and under heavy load.
This goes as far as shutting down base stations or reducing the number of subbands served at nighttime – something we were able to see very nicely happen every night from the uni lab where I spent a lot of my days (and, obviously, far too many nights).
So, there can''t be "this is how much power all towers emits" number, since it depends on usage.
Now, as also mentioned, there''s completely different cell types. With 3G and 4G, we saw the proliferation of micro-, nano- and femtocells. Those are just radioheads that can be placed nearly anywhere and serve a very restricted space – for example, a single room.
Antenna systems can be very complex, too – a modern base station will make sure to use a combination of antennas to form something like a beam that hits your phone as precisely as possible – motivation for that, again, is less necessary transmit power (lower cost) due to not illuminating anyone who''s not interested in the signal you are receiving, and of course, possibility for denser networks.
Then, there''s aspects like interoperability. A carrier might offer both 2G and 4G, often closely co-located in spectrum, on the same mast. Now, turning up the 2G downlink''s power too much might lead to saturation in 4G receiver (phone) amplifiers – and to drastic reductions in possible 4G rate for a slightly improve in 2G quality.
This problem might get even more important as operators move to deprecate and shut down 2G, and might very soon be broadly adapting schemes where 2G service is "interweaved" into 4G operation in the same band (2G is very slow, and takes only very limited "useful" bandwidth, but still occupies very precious frequency bands, so it''s only natural to use the very flexible 4G in a way that says "ok, dear handsets, this is our usage scheme, where we leave holes in time/frequency so that 2G can work ''in between''. Please ignore the content of these holes."). Then, the whole power/quality trade-off might become even more complicated.
Sometimes up to 50 or so in urban areas. Your phone can transmit up to 2 watts. antenna gain depends on losses and diversity gain (Sphere/beam coverage)
Considering exponential power loss with distance and that a microwave dinner requires about 10 minutes right next to a 630 watt antenna in a box designed to focus all that power into it, I would be more worried about my own body heat than sleeping several meters away from a busy cell tower with a roof and/or wall in between.
Even finding effective radiated power (ERP) at 10 meters is difficult. Peak power allowed in the USA can be found near 500 watts per channel. Likely the typical power is near 100 watts per channel. Intensity measures, such as watts per meter, are not so easy to obtain because the average number of channels is not well documented.
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