Grand plans for new bands

Northeastern Wisconsin is a picturesque place to spend a summer weekend, and many people from the Chicagoland and Milwaukee areas do just that, whether heading up to Northwoods cabins or flooding into the Door County peninsula for water, fun and fish boils.

While the region might be a vacationer's paradise, the flood of thousands of temporary residents every weekend creates challenges for a company trying to operate and manage a cellular network. Cellcom, an independent wireless carrier in its 20th year serving the northeastern Wisconsin area around Green Bay, knows all about those challenges.

“A lot of the markets, especially in the north part of our region, have low population densities,” said Bob Sobieck, vice president of engineering for Cellcom. “But we get a huge influx of people into some of the resort areas on the weekends. We have roaming agreements to support, so we have a large portfolio of spare [sites] that we use.”

The otherwise low population density means Cellcom has to exploit every opportunity that presents itself. The company has been expanding its total network footprint “little by little,” Sobieck said, through the acquisition of new spectrum from PCS auctions and the recent Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) auction. The AWS auction was a boon to many rural wireless carriers, giving them access to new trading areas.

“In the new markets [further out from Green Bay], we might have even lower population densities, so we need to make smarter choices about how we are going to extend our coverage,” Sobieck said. To do this, Cellcom has deployed both outdoor and indoor amplifier solutions from vendor ADC's Digivance portfolio.

In some of its newest markets, Cellcom might be the third or fourth market entrant, so coverage extension capabilities into places like rural corporate enterprises can provide a competitive edge, he said.

Hilton Nicholson, president of ADC's active infrastructure unit, said Cellcom's experience is not entirely unique, as dozens of small wireless operators are currently working on strategies to deploy in new markets using the AWS spectrum. “It's a process that will probably take the next year and longer as companies look to leverage these new bands,” he said.

Nicholson noted that expanding into new markets is a costly proposition for any wireless carrier — especially a rural operator. As ADC partners with those operators, it is trying to help them discover more cost-effective ways to roll out new infrastructure. One of the prime areas for potential savings is backhaul. Many rural operators may not necessarily have access bandwidth demand that requires a full T-1 for backhaul capacity, and the exorbitant expense of both T-1s and fiber has been well documented. Nicholson added that rural wireless carriers also might have remotely located towers or antennas deployed on top of structures such as grain elevators that can be hard for T-1s or fiber to reach.

To address the backhaul cost and distance challenges, ADC has turned to companies like E-Band Communications, a San Diego firm specializing in wireless options such as millimeter wave radio and microwave radio for fiber replacement and mobile network backhaul. E-Band, which counts ADC as an investor, offers millimeter wave systems that operate at frequencies between 71 Ghz and 86 Ghz. At frequencies that high, performance distance can be limited to a mile, but that's enough for most operators in all but the most rural and remote markets.

Saul Umbrasas, co-founder and chief marketing officer for E-Band, said the company can guarantee capacity up to 1 Gb/s for one mile. A former employee of now-defunct free space optics (FSO) vendor AirFiber, Umbrasas added that no other wireless technology can deliver that capacity for backhaul.

“FSO was never able to do that distance reliably,” he said. “Millimeter wave is really the only way.” Microwave radio firms might argue that position, but Umbrasas said microwave options are typically fraught by the crowded lower frequencies at which they operate. “We chose the higher bands because no one was using them. We started the company four years ago because we knew the FCC was going to open them up. [Licenses for 71 Ghz to 86 Ghz became available just two years ago].”

ADC announced its partnership with E-Band at the recent Wireless 2007 trade show, and the company is just one of several partners ADC has teamed up with to address the needs of secondary market operators like Cellcom. The Minneapolis vendor also has partnered with IP Access and Overture Networks. All of these companies have a commitment to IP-based infrastructure as the future of wireless.

Nicholson said ADC “provides the glue” between IP network elements by supplying the integration and management necessary to bring these new systems into an independent operators' network. He added that the vendor actually learned much of what it knows about serving rural markets in the U.S. by serving remote areas in a region halfway around the world in India.

“These markets have more in common than you think, and IP is the answer,” Nicholson said. “With IP, you are looking to get to a technology architecture that's flat, which is really the best and quickest way to get new coverage to where there is no coverage.”