Avondale (Vodafone/Woosh)

Address: Blockhouse Bay and Rosebank Roads, Avondale

November 2004: Closer-up of Vodafone’s site.

November 2004: Closer-up of Woosh Wireless’s site.

Avondale Exchange (Telecom)

November 2004

Bedford Road (Telecom)

June 2004

Ellerslie Motorway (Vodafone)

Address: Hurst and Roberts Street, Ellerslie

March 2004

Waimarie Street (Vodafone/Woosh)

January 2004

This site serves an unusual position as a passive microwave relay for Vodafone between the St Heliers Bay and Glendowie sites. Vodafone does not currently run any cellular (GSM or UMTS) services from this site.

Woosh Wireless uses this site for their wireless broadband service, as well as some microwave links to other sites in the area. There are also some other radio antennas here — I don’t know who owns these antennas and for what purposes. Possibly some antennas are operated by Metrowater in relation to the water tower.

Meadowbank (Vodafone)

December 2003: Original site.

May 2003: Note the new 2G antennas on the right-hand-side and the new microwave dish. The old 2G antennas on the left were later to be replaced by 3G antennas and the old microwave link was removed once the new one was live. The microwave link was replaced since the old one did not have enough capacity for 3G services.

Mission Bay (Telecom/Vodafone/Woosh)

December 2003: Overview of the original site. Vodafone has three pairs of sector antennas (for the 2G GSM network) on top of the building in the foreground while Telecom has their onmi-directional antennas on top of the light pole to the left, behind the building.

July 2004: The right-hand-side antennas were replaced with 3G UMTS antennas.

December 2004: Overview of the site after the 3G upgrade.

December 2004: This is a lightly better view of Telecom’s site. Their antennas are on top of the two light poles to the right and there is a third on a lightpole out of the frame to the left. This is a very discreet design, however I don’t think it will survive an upgrade to sector antenna in the future — which will happen when Telecom requires more capacity at this site. When sectorisation happens they will probaly have to relocate to the top of the building. Vodafone’s site can be found in the background.

August 2005: Woosh Wireless joined the site during 2005, adding their 3G UMTS antennas between Vodafone’s antennas. It’s interesting to see how small Woosh’s 3G antennas are compared to Vodafone’s 3G antennas. At this point Woosh had not linked their site into the network — that can be seen by the fact they had not yet attached a microwave dish to the little silver pole in front of the UMTS antennas.

In the foreground is Vodafone’s site. Their sector antennas are on top of the apartment building. Telecom, on the other hand, have their antennas on top of the light poles in the background to the left, behind the apartment building.

Records seems to indicate that this is Vodafone’s second site in Mission Bay. Vodafone had their original site at a different location but later relocated to this site. I am not sure about the reason for the relocation to this building. Perhaps Vodafone felt that they would get better coverage from a taller building?

Kohimarama (Vodafone)

November 2003: General View

November 2003: Close-Up of Antennas

June 2004: Removal of one pair of 2G antennas. This would later be replaced by a pair of 3G antennas.

July 2004: Addition of a pair of 3G antennas.

This is my local Vodafone site!

This site is rather unusual as it only has two sectors and even more unusually they are separated by only 90 degrees — instead of the usual 120 degrees. The reason for the two sectors is that the site is near the harbour, so Vodafone designed the site to only broadcast signals inland — instead of sending useless signals out to the sea where other sites already provide good coverage.

Unluckly I only found this site after it was upgraded to a sectorised set-up. Previously the site had a onmi-directional set-up for many years — however I did not see the site even during my regular travels within my own suburb! It was actually pretty much by accident that I found this site at all, I just looked up one day and saw the antennas staring back at me!

St Johns (Vodafone)

November 2003

This site is near the St Heliers Exchange (Telecom) site,which is just down the road to the right of the photo. St Johns is also a minor microwave hub site connecting sites in Glen Innes (including the Glen Innes and Morrin Road sites) to the major Glendowie hub.

Sadly the trees surrounding the site has been cut down in recent times. The trees served a very useful purpose of visually shielding the site from the traffic along St Johns Road (which can be seen in the above photo). Now the tower sticks out like a sore thumb. I wonder if the tree were cut down at Vodafone’s request to improve signal strength?

Vodafone has, also in recent times, added a new microwave dish. Apparently they had to lodge a resource consent just to add a microwave dish to an existing site! Good old Resource Management Act…

St Heliers Bay (Vodafone)

November 2003: Original set-up, as established by BellSouth in the early 1990’s.

May 2004: New dual-band 2G/3G sector antennas added, but notice the lack of cables underneath! Obviously the sector antennas were not live yet — so the onmi-directional antennas were still in service.

July 2004: Cables now attached to antenna and soon after this photo was taken the site went live with enhanced 2G capacity. I am not sure if the 3G part was live at this time since the 3G network wasn’t officially launched at the time.

This site is near the St Heliers Bay (Telecom) site. In fact it is virtually next door!

This site has a elaborate backhaul connection to the central switch. There is a microwave link to the Waimarie Street site, which is itself a passive repeater to the Glendowie site. I wonder why BellSouth (now Vodafone) went to so much effort to ensure this site had a microwave connection? They could have easily leased a dedicated line from Telecom instead! Perhaps a dedicated line was very expensive in BellSouth’s days.

This site was also the last site in the area to be upgraded from omni-directional antennas to sectorised antennas. Telecom on the other hand still use onmi-directional antennas for many of their Eastern Bays sites.

It seems that TelstraClear has thought about establishing a site in this area when they eventually set up their own network. They made a appeal to the Council’s District Plan regarding rules for establishing cell sites in this area. Vodafone also made an appeal to the same District Plan.