New York sees opportunity in small cells

New York has been one of the most proactive cities in the United States when it comes to small cell deployments. It has a well-informed city government and a history of working with the wireless industry, but even with these advantages the process of deploying small cells is arduous.
“You can’t wake up one day and say ‘I think I’m going to densify New York,'” Verizon Communications’ CFO Fran Shammo told a group of investors recently. “It’s going to take you about 24 months to do that, just to put your first small cell up.”
Alphonso Jenkins, New York’s deputy commissioner for telecommunications planning, is a former Alcatel-Lucent solutions architect with more than 25 years experience in planning, designing, deploying and optimizing wireless networks. Now Jenkins is focused on helping the city use its physical assets to enhance wireless service, and on using revenue from small cells in high-value areas to subsidize connectivity for underserved areas.
Jenkins told a panel at this year’s Wireless Infrastructure Show that New York may need to reform its telecom franchise fee. Some of the early entrants into the market have franchise agreements that require them to pay the city based on revenue, but these are hard contracts to enforce because they require the company to assign a portion of its revenue to New York.
There are currently 2,750 small cells deployed in New York and he has another 3,500 applications on his desk for installations on streetlight poles, Jenkins said. The number of applications to the city has actually gone down, because some companies could not wait for the city to grant approval and turned instead to private property owners. This can be more expensive for the infrastructure providers and represents a lost opportunity for the city.
One way to accommodate more companies and expedite deployments is to let carriers share physical infrastructure. Right now there is not a complete outdoor small cell on the market that supports more than one carrier, but operators can share fiber conduit and in some cases they may be able to share poles.
Jenkins said that one option could be a mobile telecom franchise agreement that would allow franchisees to replace some of the city’s 18,000 existing poles with “purpose-built” poles, which could accommodate “a smart antenna and a remote radio head, and the fiber can run to a base station hotel.” Jenkins has already talked to a number of equipment vendors about physical infrastructure solutions, and of course these vendors are also talking to the carriers and the neutral host providers.
The city of New York controls thousands of building rooftops, including roughly 2,000 through the New York City Housing Authority. In addition, the city is in the process of building 7,500 LinkNYC Wi-Fi kiosks at the sites that formerly housed public pay phones. Jenkins sees these as sites that mobile operators could potentially use as well.
Jenkins knows that in order to incent carriers to use city assets instead of commercial property, he will need to help them reduce their time to market and streamline the city’s processes. He said his goal is to be able to offer carriers access to thousands of sites at once. It’s an ambitious objective, but New York has already beaten the odds by earning a reputation as a wireless-friendly city despite its complexities.
“You would think it would be difficult to build in New York, but the great city of New York is probably one of the greatest cities in the world to go build wireless infrastructure in because they’re very organized,” said Mobilitie CEO Gary Jabara.
New York has indeed built a solid government organization to support wireless, but that organization will need to scale quickly if the city is to take full advantage of its small cell opportunity.
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