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Comment by peterangular | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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