...but one cell tower is plenty to cover the range of a local telco hub and, even though it's copper, there's still power lost to resistance and network saturation. (Actually, now that I think about it, the high voltage / low current setup they use works better over long distances than the other way around.)
There may be a fair amount of equipment to handle so many connections at once; however, if a little cell phone can transmit for an hour or two on a little lithium-ion battery pack then the transmitter shouldn't have to be jacked up all that high. What's the point of driving it higher than the little phones are capable of responding at - especially if you can use better antennas than the overglorified paperclips that they put in the handsets?
Also, I would hope that they would be smart enough to only run the essentials off of battery backup and just let the lights go out if the external power dies. |
