Collocation: Logical And Creative Siting Strategies
By Peggy Albright
If you thought tower siting challenges were a thing of the past, guess again.
Think of the increasing needs as a sleeping giant.
Over the next three years, the United States will need to at least double
current antenna capacity to meet the expected market for voice services alone.
Drivers include improved market penetration, increased airtime among customers
using low-cost, one-rate plans and the need for better network quality,
including capacity–an increasingly important factor as data and
third-generation services emerge. Analysts estimate that 3G services will
require four times the number of antenna sites than voice services. According to
James McIlree, an equity analyst at Tucker Anthony Cleary Gull, siting
requirements will depend on the type of service carriers want to offer, the
quality they want to guarantee and the target audience.
Since the collocation business segment got established in recent years,
independent tower firms have been grabbing up towers from operators and then
handling site acquisition, operations and maintenance for their clients.
Crown Castle, for example, purchased towers from the former Bell Atlantic
Mobile and from Powertel and now serves as landlord for those firms as well as
for BellSouth Cellular and the former GTE Wireless. Crown says operators save
from 20 percent to 30 percent in staff and equipment costs by outsourcing their
antenna business to independent firms that collocate multiple tenants.
Not only do the firms offer site engineering, acquisition and installation
services, they get needed towers through the sometimes contentious, local zoning
process and handle routine maintenance. They have equipment in-house, the labs
to field test new technologies and they have RF emissions expertise needed to
minimize interference between antennas. They also have people–a vital
ingredient in a tight labor market.
“It’s a perfect model for outsourcing,” says John Powers, vice
president of business development and communications at Crown.
Powers sees the collocation business expanding its reach. Carriers may gulp,
but Powers suggests that companies like Crown will someday function as network
operators. Service providers, from this perspective, become “content
providers,” he says.
According to Powers, Crown has established this business model in the United
Kingdom with the British Broadcasting Corp. and with a digital TV broadcast
company Ondigital. It also uses this approach with One2One in Northern Ireland.
“This is a model that can eventually migrate to the U.S. and worldwide,”
Powers says.
The biggest issue tower companies face now is providing fast and accurate
antenna site information to their customers, says Steven Moskowitz, executive
vice president of sales and marketing at American Tower. A company’s experts
have to compile zoning, environmental and capacity data on each site and
evaluate the relevance of changing regulations in each case. Documentation may
be readily available for a recent structure, but it can be harder if a tower is
10 years old, has had multiple owners or has come under new environmental
restrictions.
But will all future cell sites need towers anyway? No, says McIlree. He
points to two emerging deployment trends–microcellular networks and
distributed antenna systems.
Nokia, for example, offers its MetroSite base stations that can provide 3G
microcellular networks on equipment that is unobtrusive enough for installation
on billboards, rooftops or light poles.
And SpectraSite Communications, through its investment in Concourse
Communications Group, plans to install multiple-carrier, in-building networks in
airports and tunnels by injecting signals into leaky coaxial cable. The signals
leak out through slits cut at regular intervals along the cable, creating a
distributed antenna system.
Concourse recently announced a deal to install the system at Port Authority
of New York/New Jersey airports and tunnels, including John F. Kennedy
International, LaGuardia and Newark International airports and the Holland and
Lincoln tunnels, among other venues. AT&T Wireless Services, Verizon
Wireless, Nextel Communications and VoiceStream have all subscribed to the
network.
“Is that a ‘tower’?” McIlree asks himself. “No. Is that a
nontraditional example of where collocation can be used? Yes.” For those
having trouble visualizing a tower company at work increasing network reach
without going vertical, he suggests thinking of this new system as a long,
skinny tower sitting on its side in a tunnel.
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