Infrastructure builds to be strong for next few years

DENVER–LTE and WiMAX buildouts, as well as an increased attention on distributed antenna systems, should keep equipment manufacturers, site acquisition companies and others in the tower-siting business busy in the next few years, according to panelists at the Colorado Wireless Association educational and social event Thursday evening at Invesco Field. Meanwhile, new estimates from research firm Visant Strategies support those expectations.
Even as panelists acknowledged that wireless carriers can no longer site large towers in crowded urban locations, increased traffic on networks –which is only going to continue to explode — is going to force carriers to address capacity issues. As such, carriers are beginning to embrace DAS solutions and including them in their network planning, said Greg Watson, regional sales manager, Wireless Network Solutions at ADC Telecommunications. A multi-tenant DAS network was just installed in the exclusive Cherry Hills area in Denver because residents demanded better cellular coverage but didn’t want their views obstructed, said Rick Sullivan, AT&T real estate and construction manager for the Rocky Mountain cluster. Sullivan reminded the audience that the “sins of one” company in the tower-siting business quickly become “the sins of many,” as planning authorities tend to punish everyone trying to site a facility if one company falls short on delivering what was promised to the municipality. Sullivan also noted that same mentality is now impacting local authorities because the Federal Communications Commission’s shot-clock ruling forces all municipalities to play by the same set of rules because a smaller set of government agencies have drawn out siting decisions.
Compared to some states, Colorado is fairly progressive in wireless regulation, noted Mark Williams, an attorney focused on telecom initiatives. Colorado passed a statewide telecommunications act in 1995, the year before the federal law was enacted. However, because Colorado has term limits, new legislators need to be educated regularly about tower-siting.
Despite zoning and other challenges, wireless networks will continue to be built out and optimized to be able to handle the increasing demands from consumers who have shown no signs of tempering their wireless expectations.
Indeed, according to research from Visant Strategies, both base station and backhaul buildouts will jump in the next five years. “There are between two and three base stations per site on average with sites growing from a good number over 100,000 to over 150,000 by year-end 2015, and we see the number of sites in need of a backhaul capacity of 155 Mbps and greater growing over seven-fold by year-end 2015,” according to Larry Swasey, co-founder of Visant. Visant estimates Verizon Wireless has the most base stations, at well over 60,000, while AT&T Mobility and Sprint Nextel Corp. count more than 50,000 base stations, and T-Mobile USA Inc. at more than 40,000.
“AT&T and Verizon will be able to gain nationwide LTE coverage with substantial capacity by deploying between 15,000 and 25,000 LTE base stations. They’ll need substantially fewer base stations for coverage compared to existing cellular and especially 1.9 GHz PCS systems because they are deploying on the 700 MHz band and because the first iteration of LTE will include 2×2 MIMO,” Swasey said.
Clearwire Corp. will need from one-and-one-half to three times the number of mobile WiMAX base stations simply because it operates at a higher frequency, Swasey noted. For more information, contact Swasey or Andy Fuertes at www.visantstrategies.com.