International Speedway is one of several American Tower DAS customers boosting demand for engineers who have experience with distributed antenna systems.
DAS skills in demand
Experience with distributed antenna systems is in demand as tower companies and infrastructure service providers win new contracts and upgrade existing systems. Within the last week, 29 new jobs calling for DAS-related skill sets have been posted on telecomcareers.net.
American Tower has posted seven DAS-related jobs within the past week, one of which is a network operations manager to oversee the operational aspects of the NASCAR program. American Tower won a 2012 contract to develop 12 DAS systems for International Speedway, including several venues that host NASCAR events.
Other DAS jobs posted by American Tower within the past week include openings for business development professionals to work in Houston and Irvine, California, senior RF engineers to work in Irvine and Las Vegas, a construction manager to work in Denver, and a systems performance engineer in Irving, Texas.
Other firms with recent DAS-related job postings include MasTec Network Solutions, with four positions in Ohio, and ExteNet, with positions in Lisle, Illinois, and Washington, D.C.
Recruiters say they have seen an increase in requests for individuals with DAS experience. Paul Harris of GRN Blackhawk noted that carriers are focused on DAS as a way to densify networks which in some cases have been characterized as “a mile wide and an inch deep.”
20 years in one week
Cisco says mobile devices spent a total of 20 years connected to its Wi-Fi network at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The company says that since February it has gotten a lot of questions about its Wi-Fi deployment in Barcelona, and to answer some of those questions it has published a white paper.
Only a quarter of the Wi-Fi traffic at MWC came from smartphones and tablets, while three quarters came from Macintosh and Windows devices. Android traffic surpassed iOS traffic, and OSX (Macintosh) traffic surpassed Windows traffic.
MWC attendees generated more than four times as much Wi-Fi Internet traffic this year as last, using more Wi-Fi during the first hour of the event than they did during the entire MWC event last year.
