Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Wind, Solar & Biofuels to Power Remote Cell Towers

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Fri Mar 09, 2007 02:48 PM
from the go-juice dept.
Power Technology
tcd004 writes "How do you set up a cell network when there's no power grid? Namibia, India and Nigeria are building towers using localized power sources to provide critical cell phone access to the most remote parts of their countries. Wind/solar hybrids, and biofuel power plants will power the radio towers, peripheral communications, and even the protective fencing around the installations."
+ -
story
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Wind, Solar & Biofuels to Power Remote Cell Towers 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • developing nations?! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cashman73 (855518) on Friday March 09 2007, @02:51PM (#18292926) Journal
    Heck! They need to put a couple of these suckers in Arizona (not Phoenix),... ;-)

    I-17 has horrible cell coverage in places, and could really use something better. The only cell phones that even work at the Grand Canyon are Verizon phones (although perhaps Verizon likes it that way).

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Vancorps (746090)

      That's funny, when I went to the Grand Canyon my sister's verizon cell phone didn't work while my Sprint phone did. You're right though, reception is spotty on the 17. I drove cross country and the 17 was the only place I ever lost reception.

      The thing I still can fathom is why AZ doesn't use more solar power than it does with more 300 days of sun a year this is one of the best places on earth to try it out for real.

      • Try getting cell phone reception in the Freeways of Appalachia. I would have been screwed when driving through eastern Kentucky and Tennessee on I75 if my car had died.

        • I was fortunate as I came from the northern route on the 40. No issues there except for damned toll roads in NY. How I hate toll roads. The majority of the trip was fun except for Oklahoma where there was a toll every 5 feet and NY where we had to pay once.

          I've often considered getting a satphone, the service is cheap its just the phones are expensive.

    • Consider - in Namibia and Nigeria, I doubt there is much of a paying customer base to pay for installation and upkeep of such facilities; and I'll wager that in India, the towers under discussions are meant to serve areas of the country with little of interest to commercial providers. They need a system of towers which they can install, configure and walk away from. Doubtless the governments of the respective countries are directly involved in the planning, implementation and financing of the towers in qu
      • You don't have to go all "they're out to get you" on this issue. It's just the case that population density along I17 is too low and it hasn't been profitable for any of the existing cell companies to erect antennas across it yet. Solar power might actually be a good idea given the area though, especially since a lot of it is literally out in the middle of nowhere and it's expensive to run power lines out into the middle of nowhere.

      • Huh?

        If I can cut expenses (overhead) from my costs of operation, I could easily charge the same amount and make more profit. At least it's that way in the U.S.

        Maybe the part that I'm missing from your counterintuitive argument is that the amount CellTelco would be allowed to charge if it were regulated by that government, presuming they were subsidized/under contract by the government to setup service. If that is what you meant, then I see your point. Example being: If my company's network costs $1

    • I often take the drive from Tucson to Prescott or Flagstaff (I-10, I-17), and my Sprint phone gets undivided service the entire distance (save for one tiny stretch of road just south of Phoenix).

      It would be cool if all services just used all the same towers, then it wouldn't matter which provider you have. :\
  • are staggering, this is an excellent idea. Let's hope the implementation is on par.

    • Long ago one of my power generation professors gave a lecture about a solar powered communications tower he set up, in Nevada I think it was. He said the one thing they did not account for and which made the project unprofitable was crazy hicks with rifles shooting the solar panels for sport, from the next mountain over. Don't forget to include a robot sentry with a sniper rifle in the implementation.

      • More likely city folk who think of guns as fun instead of being a tool. Note: for purposes of this post, "city folk" are any people who can see their neighbor's house from theirs. Real hicks can find plenty of target practice shooting varmints and such.

        On the other hand, if a company builds a road into my favorite spot and puts up an ugly cell tower, they can expect a few holes in it. But I don't consider that crazy.

        • More likely city folk who think of guns as fun instead of being a tool.

          How many "city folk" do you suppose are armed on mountains so remote you need a helicopter to bring in construction materials?

          Real hicks can find plenty of target practice shooting varmints and such.

          I've lived in a number of places that could easily be considered hicksville. I used to carry a pistol on my belt to get from the place I was staying to the nearest road because of all the bears. There are plenty of "hicks" who just like shooting things. I knew some guys when I was a kid who used to go shoot out the tires of logging trucks, not because they disliked logging, but

    • Indeed. I've often wondered how many resources are used just to push usable energy around, and if there is in fact a benefit to having massively distributed power generation rather than massive power plants.

      Sure, this would have to be a different paradigm then shipping fuels to a single location, but you'd think that everyone could have a solar array and windmill on their property - except for goofy things like zoning and 'beautification' rules :(

      Heck, using that method you don't even lose all the power i

  • To "localized power sources" But of course, slashdot standards require that you spend more than 20 seconds on a single thought, so I added this sentence.

  • Protective Fencing? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Radon360 (951529) on Friday March 09 2007, @02:59PM (#18293070)

    So they're installing electric fences around these sites to prevent theft and looting of equipment/metals? Cute.

    Now all someone has to do to compromise that is to booger up the solar panel (Water balloon slingshot with mudpies), or throw a rope into the windmill (or drop it in with a kite) and wait several days.

    • I imagine the cell company will configure them to monitor for low batteries and go check them out when they're not working properly.

      • No doubt they will...but what will their response time be? I hope it's better than what we generally see around here at sites that are far more accessible.
    • No worries, electric fencing always has a power backup (atleast 12-24 hours)... there would also be a transmitter attached to an alarm, so if anyone touched the fence, they first get shocked (that would probably knock them out) and an alarm would go off alerting security. Remote regions of Nigeria are very dusty and harsh in general, so I suspect there would be weekly (if not daily) inspections. If someone really wanted to put the tower out of commission they could just fire-bomb it.
    • Why not just ground the fence or wear rubber gloves? Although, a mudapult would be cool...

      • But an electric fence for a horse/cow is a whole different animal (pardon the pun). Basically, you charge up a coil, much like a coil on the ignition system in a car and pulse it into the fence wire at roughly 1 second intervals. The "off" time allows the fencer to last that long on a battery, and the interval is usually sufficient to get the offending animal to stop leaning on the fence. It keeps animals in, but doesn't really offer any security, nor will it melt away someone's attempt to ground fault/s

  • How are "HP Sponsored Solutions" and "compare prices" related to this story in any way? Is HP building these towers? Are there multiple suppliers of these towers, so that we might need to compare prices? WTF is this place turning into?
  • Kashawak - NO FO!!!!

  • Just in time! (Score:4, Funny)

    by stratjakt (596332) on Friday March 09 2007, @03:07PM (#18293176) Journal
    My friend, the prince of nigeria, is going to be calling me about the 100 million dollars he's going to give me for helping him out!
    • Sorry, I beat you to the punch I just emailed him my account information for the transfer. You can have the next 100 million.

  • Also (Score:4, Insightful)

    by skuzz03 (970606) on Friday March 09 2007, @03:08PM (#18293200)
    Those bits of Utah where you drive a hundred miles just north of the AZ/UT border and there's no power, lights, phone, electricity, anything for seemingly forever. The only way to call for help out there is with a satphone.

    Talk about no bars in no places!

    They have enough sunlight out there in the deserts it should be relatively easy to implement a solar-only with generator-backup power system to keep the sites up, then use microwave point-to-point links between sites and dual uplinks on either side of the network for redundancy in the event sites in the middle fail.

    Providers won't bother doing that though, they have no population out there to cover, and why would they care about public safety? They're too busy wasting resources deploying mobile TV and camera phones and video phones and all their other useless nonsense.
    • You know, there is nothing wrong from being away from it all.

    • Can we dispense with the anti-corporate bullshit? If you want service out there for public safety, start chipping in cash yourself. Otherwise, service will be put out there when it's commericially viable.
  • Or, you could run power in alongside the lines that you laid when connecting the cell towers to the wired network. Somewhere down the way is a plug you could use.

    • 1) Who says there's a wire connecting the cell tower to the network? It could be a satellite link, it could be a microwave link to the ground. But I only glanced over TFA.
      2) A non-POTS communication line isn't good to anyone, except for perhaps monetary value. Electricity, however, is always useful. They wouldn't want people stealing their power. It's also quite expensive to string all that heavy cable up so that you can transmit the power without exceptional losses.

    • The tower interconnects are likely to be microwave relay-based. Not only would it be less expensive, but you wouldn't have all that copper wire vulnerable for someone to come along and steal.

    • Somewhere down the way is a plug you could use.

      What if there isn't - not everyone lives in a city.

      Australia has a lot of solar powered repeaters for various bits of comminications gear - often on mountain tops kilometres away from a powerline.

  • Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)

    by edwardpickman (965122) on Friday March 09 2007, @03:23PM (#18293382)
    how often third world countries embrace alternative sources where as we're told they are too expensive in the first world. There's a good reason many use alternative sources in these countries, the lack of an infastructure for delivering power.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by marcog123 (969158)

      The main reason is the rapid increase in uptake of cell phones in developing regions. The cellular providers are ripping off the people in these countries simply because they can. And the people are so hooked on cell phones that they fall for the trap. It's like the new in thing. You'd be surprised.

      I'm from South Africa and one of our lecturers who researches HCI went to Zambia for two months to study the use of cell phones. He said you'd be amazed at where you'd find cell towers - in the middle of the mi

    • I was recently in Haiti. While in the airport waiting for the flight back, I was talking to a guy from a Canadian firm erecting towers for the country's exploding GSM rollout. He explained to me that the power there is so unreliable, each cell site has 2 diesels, which run on 10 hour cycles. (Indeed, I did experience the unreliability) They don't even bother with local power infrastructure.

      What that must cost to install and run at each tower is quite surprising to me.
    • [Interesting] how often third world countries embrace alternative sources where as we're told they are too expensive in the first world.

      That's the exact reason they're too expensive: We have an existing delivery system in place that they can't afford to build. I think the concept of massively overhauling our existing large systems is going to massively drain what resources we already have.
      • Actually while to us building such a system is cost effective since its used for many things in poor countries it wouldn't be since it'd be used for very few things. The same thing holds in the US, in some places its cheaper to have your own power generation than to extend the grid simply to cover a single house in the middle of nowhere. Also in such countries getting fuel to such a site reliably would be much harder than in the US.
  • This is more important than it sounds--the remote and underdeveloped areas of the world that need cell phone penetration more than the developed world does, because the increase in efficiency they create for the local economy is more important when so many people are living at or below sustenance level. (Cell phone usage raises a community's GDP, at least to a point.)
  • How do the locals power their new cell phones exactly?
    • Probably via landline power. But it's very likely that that landline power supply a)is intermittant and/or b)doesn't reach to the nearest cell tower, which is often located on a hill outside town.
  • HI I am a representative for the Prince of Arkansas, and I am wanting to present you with a gourgous opportunity. If you will be kind enough to give me your bank account information I would be very happy to set you up with some solar cell access.

    PLEASE NO MORE CONNECTIVITY FOR NIGERIA... PLEASE!!!!

    • Re:powered fencing? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by smooth wombat (796938) on Friday March 09 2007, @03:03PM (#18293128) Homepage Journal
      Why does the fencing need electricity?


      Thievery and yes, probably because of elephants (think scratching posts).

      With the amount of metal that would be in these things and considering the poverty of the countries mentioned, you can be absolutely sure that if the fencing was not electrified, the equipment would be stolen the same night it was installed and sold for scrap metal.

      Let's put it this way, even in the stable country of Iraq, entire towers which hold up electrical wires are toppled and sold for scrap. Think what would happen to this equipment if it were placed next to a roadway in one of the three countries and didn't have any form of protection.

      • ...yes, here in the USSK, people steal the copper cables from the railway signalling circuits and sell those for scrap, too. (I know, I know: In Soviet Britain, coppers steal YOU!)

        Or maybe that's just the latest British Rail v3.0 excuse for having a Third World railway.
        • Then the signal from the tower is lost, small army belonging to the owner of the cell company with AK-47s on bikes comes and feeds the thief his own balls.
          • yeah....except the thiefs would be long gone.

            If they were close enough to get to the thives in time, they wouldn't need the damn fence.

            The really need a way to prevent them from being valuable.
            Mayby coat the metal in something that would take time and heat to remove?
            Or stamp them all over the place, and close any scrap place that has them on their premises.

            I suppose you could flood the market with aluminum removing any local value they have as scrap.

    • The difference is that we're more concerned about efficiency now, for a variety of reasons. And in Africa, there's not a lot of fuel lying around. In fact this is why the rocket stove [efn.org] was invented; so that people could make better use of available fuels so they could stop cooking their food over plastic fires and such. Where they're using solar panels, they are STILL making use of centralized energy - it goes into the construction of the panel. Where they're using wood, they'll probably try to burn it as ef
      • I don't think anyone says its not doable (it's been done with diesel generators for decades in some places, even say Iraq) but simply that for the vast majority of people (who already have a grid hookup) its just not cost effective.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.