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Mar. 14, 2010

According to attendees at the Colorado Wireless Association Educational and Social Event on March 11, LTE (long term evolution) and new Wi-MAX networks, as well as an increased focus on distributed antenna systems should keep mobile infrastucture equipment manufacturers, site acquisition companies and other firms engaged in the tower-siting industry fairly busy until at least mid-2012.

At the same time, new estimates from research firm Visant Strategies support those expectations as well.

When compared to other states, Colorado is fairly progressive in wireless regulation, noted Mark Williams, an attorney focused on telecom and wireless initiatives. The state passed a wide-ranging telecommunications act more than 15 years ago, the year before the federal law was enacted.

But because Colorado has term limits, new legislators need to be educated regularly about tower-siting, nevertheless.

And despite zoning regulations and other issues, mobile networks will continue to be built and optimized to be able to handle the increasing wireless traffic from mobile users who have shown no signs of slowing down their expectations.

Even as conference members 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 mobile service carriers to directly address capacity issues.

As a direct result of all of this, wireless 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 mobile coverage but didn’t want their views obstructed, said Rick Sullivan, AT&T real estate and construction manager for the Rocky Mountains.

Sullivan reminded conference attendees 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 this same mentality is now impacting many other local authorities on U.S. soil simply because of the FCC’s stiff ruling that all municipalities need to play by the same set of rules because a smaller set of government agencies have drawn out siting decisions.

And it gets worse.

According to a new study done by research firm Visant Strategies, both base station and backhaul buildouts will jump in the next five years.

According to Larry Swasey, co-founder of Visant "there are now 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."

Visant also estimates that Verizon Wireless has the most base stations (approximately 61,500) while AT&T Mobility and Sprint Nextel count about 52,120 base stations, and T-Mobile USA at about 42,500.

“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 systems because they are deploying on the 700 MHz band and because the first iteration of LTE will include 2x2 MIMO,” Swasey said.

However, Clearwire 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.

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Source: Visant Research & Ass.