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Comment by mbostleman | Hacker News Reader

Any reason AT&T isn't removing and disposing of these towers?

So some of the towers are still in AT&T's ownership but a ton of them got sold off to American Tower for resale and leasing space.

People do everything from run cellular on them, run datacenters in the nuclear hardened bunker sites, etc. Even though they're old as heck and look like something out of a sci-fi many structures are still solid and some of the sites have things like diversified utilities.

Then finally, there's the EPA... these towers can be a nightmare for EPA - specifically the ones with backup generator fuel tanks that were buried. I'm guessing AT&T didn't want to deal with the complex logistics of digging those up, horn removal, etc. and just sold many of the properties off.

The ones that are still in AT&T's ownership also have fiber co-sited at them, usually on former coax routes, like this former main station between Colorado springs and Amarillo.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/37°55'27.3%22N+102°36'36.5...

There is still active microwave, but its usually in the ownership of the RBOC/IOC not a long distance carrier, and is used to link the end office to the rest of the PSTN. Microwave is also used extensively to link cell sites to other cell sites, so you need to install less fiber.

Huh - looked at that location on street view and it is so weird seeing a modern AT&T logo on a Long Lines site building!

Microwave backhaul fascinates me... I think the most interesting example of it that blows my mind is the private backhauls that are going up between major financial hubs in the US like Chicago <-> New York. Since latency is a huge deal for a lot of these HFT traders some intense stuff gets engineered:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/priva...

Specific quote I'm referencing:

> The researchers then used the FCC and other records to deduce that, at the time of their 2013 study, there were 15 (!) networks licensed to operate microwave links between the two cities.

Freakin' wild!

Most of the non-microwave only sites were converted to fiber, so they're out there quietly humming in the night, soldiering on, just passing traffic, their facilities which were designed to be manned 24/7, might see an engineer once a week, or even once a month.

I've often dreamed about building a private national microwave network to sell capacity on. They're not expensive to build or operate with modern hardware, which doesnt need much power or servicing.

Wanna see something truly wild?

https://archive.org/details/bstj56-10-1829

Buried waveguide! a path not taken, as fast as microwave, with more controlled path characteristics. Had fiber not worked out to be practical, this would have been the replacement for the L-5 Coax network, as fiber proved to be.

Wow - and they actually had a field test that worked...! I have such a huge respect for the engineers that worked on these systems - it feels like some wild west sorta stuff.

It supported digital too, much like the last generation of microwave gear did.

Cost. Several of them are hosting cell and radio services so that "pays the rent" on the location.

Dismantling and scrapping such a tower would be enormously expensive and bring no value to AT&T shareholders.

If they're in total disrepair, I'm sure a case can be made for safety in an urban area. The two towers closest to me are in rural areas with several other radio service tenants where maintenance is a covered cost.

Legacy AT&T owns almost none of them anymore, what's left are owned by the RBOC (often the other AT&T) and as you note, have a prohibitive removal cost and are in urban centers.

Microwave back haul in telecom networks is still very prevalent the difference between what this article describes and modern day is how it is used. Now days the microwave part of the network is usually regional to connect groups of towers in a local area to a central location that has fiber or satellite access into the main network. This older system was doing the job of what fiber does today serving as the main cross country network.

AT&T sold most of them off in the early 2000s. American Tower owns a lot of them. Some others went to individual private owners. There's a company in western MT that owns about five of the mountain top sites for instance. Very few of the rural/suburban sites are still owned by AT&T. The sites where AT&T still happens to be the ILEC in an area may have horns on a central office roof just because they're very expensive and a huge hassle to decommission.

Many of these towers are also used for other equipment as well, and not abandoned.

It's also worth mentioning that big equipment like this isn't designed to be removed from towers, and not only would be expensive to remove, but extremely dangerous. It's a lot safer and cheaper to just leave it there, and mount additional equipment (cellular equipment, etc) elsewhere on the tower.

But it will rust and eventually fall down, so doesn't the cost show up at some later point anyway?

There's usually other antennas on the tower for cellular or VHF/UHF, so the tower itself is maintained. And the microwave horns and waveguide are typically aluminum and/or copper.

The tower sites are maintained.

This is the famous Japanese method known as katamari.

THey don't actually own many (most?) of them anymore. Most have been sold and are owned by a handful of "tower operating" companies who will lease space on the tower. The ones in areas with no other market for radio towers have been/are being scrapped.

The one I grew up near was eventually sold to Crown Castle, now used as a cell tower.

https://long-lines.net/places-routes/Lake_Zurich_IL/index.ht...

I'm gonna guess that spending money on that seems a highly dubious investment.

Almost all the sites are still in use due to the resurgence in terrestrial wireless use in the past 20 years.

safety and clean-up are always a cost center, on the books.

most of them are just on top of mountains or hills

http://long-lines.net/places-routes/index.html

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