- That mobile phone in your hand
is a stunning piece of technology
that's almost completely useless
without a network to power it.
When you're at home or in the office,
that's taken care of by wifi.
But when you go out into the world,
you need a cellular network to keep you connected.
That's why you see cell towers
all over the place these days.
But the most interesting ones
are those you don't see.
I asked AT&T to take me on a tour of two of them.
One in a church steeple,
and one on top of a mountain.
And to my great surprise,
they said yes.
I'm Michael Fisher.
Join me to learn about the network
behind your phone
on the Mr. Mobile tower tour.
(upbeat music)
Duxbury, Massachusetts.
Home of excellent oysters,
beautiful coastlines
and Shakespeare productions
featuring familiar YouTubers.
Down the road from all that,
is the First Parish Unitarian Church
built in 1840.
Nothing seems out of the ordinary
as you cross the parlor
and pass the pews in the meeting house.
But when you head up in the attic,
you find more cables than any church should need.
It's nothing nefarious though.
These are the conduits
feeding the cell tower,
or more properly,
the cell site hidden up above.
Obscured in the steeple itself
to preserve Duxbury's bucolic landscape.
We followed the cables up some narrow stairs
and I do mean narrow.
The hardhat isn't just for looks.
And we come to the bell tower.
Yes the bell is real
and yes it still works.
(bell chimes)
Now we're pretty high off the ground at this point
but not quite far enough
to be optimal for the kind of coverage
this site needs.
So it's up an even smaller ladder
to the base of the steeple itself.
This is where the magic happens.
Magic you can hear on the audio feed here.
(audio feedback ringing)
That's the sound of one of the camera's
poorly shielded components
reacting to the radio frequency energy up here.
And while that might sound scary,
it's actually safe.
The workers who have to come up here
to service the equipment are safe
because they follow strict procedures.
And the people down below in the church
are safe for two reasons.
The first is called the oil rig effect.
The antennas up on the steeple
aren't pointed straight down,
but outward.
Which makes sense if you think about it.
The second reason is something called
the inverse square law.
See radio frequency energy drops off with distance,
and it does it fast.
Up here in the steeple,
I'm standing about 10 feet from one of the antennas.
Down at ground level,
about 50 feet away.
The RF signal is 16 times weaker.
This is one of the reasons
carriers need to build so many cell sites
to cover a given area.
The further you get from a tower,
the harder your phone has to work
to stay connected to it.
For the same reason,
this entire church steeple had to be replaced
with a fiber glass replica.
Which is why you can see the sun
glowing through it here.
Fiberglass is more transparent to radio waves than wood.
It's all about getting the strongest possible connection
to your phone.
But the radio side is just part of the story.
The data packets that flip back and forth
when you send a text message
or subscribe to a YouTube channel,
well they have to traverse the internet.
And to get to it,
landlines are still
usually the most efficient way.
So we follow the conduits
back down the steeple,
through the church and out back
to the equipment shelter.
This basically a concrete shack
where the connection to the landline network happens.
This is what's called back-haul.
And these days it's all done with fiber.
You ever wonder what happens if the power goes out?
Well that's where this rack of lead acid batteries come in.
They provide an uninterrupted power supply
in an event of an outage.
There's also a diesel generator outside
with enough fuel to power the site
for about a day.
Generally that's more than enough to last through
the storm in this part of the country.
Speaking of storms,
this south side doesn't worried about them much.
Tucked away as it is
inside that cozy church.
Well I wanted to see a tower
that was a little more
rough and tumble.
So I woke up early one day and drove
and drove
up to the white mountain of New Hampshire.
Specifically, Mount Washington,
the highest point in the Northeastern United States
and 20th century record holder
for highest wind speed ever recorded.
In fact as I wrote this script,
the mountain had just broken another record
for coldest recorded temperature at the summit
at minus 34 degrees Fahrenheit.
Well that's why I went up there in August
on what turned out to be a gorgeous day.
It's still a treacherous ride up the incline though.
So at 2700 feet,
I traded in my rental car
for more appropriate transportation.
(train horn blares)
it took about 45 minutes to chug
the remaining 3500 feet to the summit.
Much of it at angles almost too steep to stand.
But I hopped off at the very peak of Mount Washington.
The weather was still excellent.
And the views were amazing.
The climate was so good during my visit,
that in fact it was hard to imagine
the kind of violent storms I heard about.
Until I rounded a corner and saw this.
This is not the tower I came to see.
It's a microwave transmitter for back-haul.
More on this in a second.
Anyway this cover was made of fiberglass
and it was almost totally demolished.
As I meandered around the mountain top,
I saw several of these things.
And fiberglass and canvas alike
just ripped right open
by the punishing weather here.
Some were just plain missing.
Now I had assumed that one of these huge structures
was the AT&T site.
No these are actually old school.
They're FM transmitters
for radio stations WPKQ and WHOM
In fact the tower that I came to see,
it's this humble little stove pipe.
This was a pre-existing structure
that AT&T acquired.
It's history stretching all the way back
to the 60's when it was built
as a transmitter for TV station WMTW.
Well it's been here ever since.
So apparently these cable stays are indeed
as strong as they look.
Remember all the antenna equipment we saw
up in the steeple in Duxbury?
Well imagine all of that
crammed into this.
There's not quite as much gear in here
since there's just the one carrier.
But it's still a densely packed mammoth of machinery.
The mast is actually part of the site,
covering lands south of the mountain.
The northern regions are taken care of
by a dedicated sector
built on to the side of the observatory.
It looks much more like the antennas
you're probably used to seeing on towers and buildings.
By the way,
the clouds really do move this quickly up here.
It's pretty awesome.
Following the wave gods into the yankee building,
we can see that the equipment shelter
looks much the same
as the one down in Duxbury
but a little more spartan.
Well because it's at the top of a mountain.
This site doesn't have the kind of fiber back-haul
to connect it to the landline network
like Duxbury does.
Instead it relies on microwave back-haul.
Remember those beat up antennas?
And this particular installation
hasn't yet been updated
to support LTE.
So for the moment,
this is one of the few AT&T sites left
in the whole country that doesn't have it.
The company tells me it's planning an upgrade
for this spring.
As soon as it's safe to work on the mountain again.
At which point,
even this tower will be an LTE site.
Both of the cell sites I visited
did the same job.
Filling up that signal bar on your phone.
But each has to deal with
it's own particular challenges to do that.
Down in Duxbury,
keeping people happy meant
refitting half a church
so folks could preserve the look of their town
instead of adding a cell tower.
Up on Mount Washington,
aesthetics are secondary.
The primary concern
is keeping the tower upright and broadcasting.
Even as punishing weather pummels the site
nine months out of the year.
There are a great many more challenges
to running a network
from capacity concerns,
to roaming agreements.
And maybe I'll take a closer look
at those in a future video.
But even putting those extra hurdles aside,
I came away from my double tower tour
with a renewed appreciation
for how much thought and sweat
goes into the networks that keep you connected.
Folks I've wanted to climb a cell tower
for 17 years and it's something
I never expected to be allowed to do.
So I want to thank AT&T
for opening these sites to me.
And for letting me talk the ears off
all their engineers in the process.
Drop a thumbs up if you want to see more
videos like this.
And if you've got a cool idea
for another Mr. Mobile field trip,
drop it in the comments.
I'd love to read it.
Until next time,
thanks for watching.
And stay mobile, my friends.