Fido towers dissapearing?

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Mark Morissette - 21 May 2005 04:45 GMT

Anyone notice that their phones are beginning to lose "Fido" as an
available network selection based on location?

I've had my HipTop locked onto the Rogers towers for the last week or
so, and decided earlier today while in the Pickering area to switch
back to the Fido side, as I knew for a fact that where I was parked at
the time, the Fido tower provided a better signal.

However, alas, no Fido network to be found after repeated searches -
only the Rogers network was appearing..

Are they tearing down towers already?

---
Mark Morissette
Courtice, Ontario, Canada
http://oshawapilot.blogspot.com (My student pilot blog)

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JF Mezei - 21 May 2005 06:41 GMT

> Are they tearing down towers already?

The process will be complete nationwide by October of this year. A very
ambitious goal.

In all cases, there will no longer be a tower offering the Microcell
network ID.
In some cases, the Microcell towers will remain but will be broadcasting
Rogers network ID.

Not sure if they will start to physically tear down towers declared
redundant. I would hope that they would keep those for some time in case
they realise they made some mistakes and the new network has some gaping
holes. When they rebuilt a nationwide network in less than a year, they
are bound to have less than optimum network. It will take some time to
fine tune everything afterwards.

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Mark Morissette - 21 May 2005 21:33 GMT

>Not sure if they will start to physically tear down towers declared
>redundant. I would hope that they would keep those for some time in case
>they realise they made some mistakes and the new network has some gaping
>holes.

I was hoping they would leave some redundancy in at least the CityFido
areas.. My fear is that once all the Fido towers go offstream, that
the remaining towers will end up being overloaded with the CityFido
traffic, and there will be no alternative.

I was a Rogers (Actually, Cantel at the time) customer many moons ago,
and I remember the early growing pains. There was times that I would
receive the "Network Busy" alert for 20 or 30 minutes while trying to
make a call.

On many occasions I ended up just using payphones instead.

I sure hope we're not going down that road again...

---
Mark Morissette
Courtice, Ontario, Canada
http://oshawapilot.blogspot.com (My student pilot blog)

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JF Mezei - 21 May 2005 23:08 GMT

> areas.. My fear is that once all the Fido towers go offstream, that
> the remaining towers will end up being overloaded with the CityFido
> traffic, and there will be no alternative.

Not quite. Rogers will be combining all of the spectrum (channels) onto
the single network. So while there will be fewer antennas in operation,
there will be the same combined bandwidth and capacity. Difference is
that the channels originally dedicated to Fido subscribers, and those
decicated to Rogers subscribers will now be used by both subscriber bases.

Where capacity might be reduced is if Rogers decides to make bigger
cells when removing antennas. This means more callers sharing the same tower.

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lurker - 21 May 2005 17:24 GMT

It's called INTEGRATION.

> Anyone notice that their phones are beginning to lose "Fido" as an
> available network selection based on location?
[quoted text clipped - 13 lines]
> Courtice, Ontario, Canada
> http://oshawapilot.blogspot.com (My student pilot blog)

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