“eNBs have a much higher density than I thought.”
A seven-minute drive through Sunnyvale touched five towers and nine cells. The “45 mile range” figure everyone quotes is a rural number. In a city there is a tower every mile, bolted to churches and pylons. The 3GPP specs run to hundreds of documents and there is no open source LTE stack to learn from. The network in your pocket is a black box by design.