Cell Site (VF/WW Glover Park)

Close-up photo of the North-West Face taken in Janruary 2004. There is a more recent photo taken from approximately the same angle in September 2008.

BellSouth/Vodafone

When BellSouth was building out its network in the early 1990's, they needed a microwave relay site between its isolated St Heliers Bay site with the Glendowie hub — since there was no line of sight between the two sites.

This water tower was chosen since it had line of sight between the two sites. Despite BellSouth going to the effort to establish a microwave relay at this site, they never bothered installing antennas for GSM mobile services here.

I think BellSouth put in too much effort just to avoid paying Telecom for a landline link to their St Heliers site. They could have just used this one site to cover the local area — instead of building out two sites (i.e. this relay site and the St Heliers Bay cell site).

Their microwave dishes can be seen on the top-right of the water tower in the photo. There is a note showing where it is located.

Woosh Wireless

Woosh has panels for all three sectors providing 360° coverage to the surrounding area. There are microwave links on the other side of the site linking this site into the network — with records showing them as Remuera and St Johns.

Oddly, their sector alignment is not very optimised — one sector pretty much points out to sea with very little prospect of customers out there! This is the panel seen in the foreground in the above photo. Again there is a note showing where it is located.

I took a photo four years later showing the service area of this particular panel. It can easily be seen that operating this panel is probably rather pointless.