Dear Prudents

Far from the Valley of Silicon, nestled in the southeast corner of the Gem State near the scenic city of Idaho Falls, on a plot of land the size of Rhode Island, is a scientific beehive known as the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.

Among the goggled biomass scientists and the space-suited nuclear energy researchers, across the compound from the military testers trying to duplicate the protective qualities of Frodo's mithril coat, hums the Bechtel Wireless Test Bed, or BWTB, where a full range of spectrum is yours for the asking. It is a proving ground — a place, Jake MacLeod said, where real scientists do the real work of removing the marketing fluff from wireless technology specifications.

MacLeod is principal vice president and chief technology officer of Bechtel Telecommunications. The BWTB is his baby, the newer of the company's two laboratories. So new, in fact, it still awaits its grand opening: an executive forum maybe, or just a photo op — who knows?

Given the overhead restrictions some of his clients are facing, MacLeod said he might just forgo the hoopla and get down to business. “After all, we already consider it a success, and so do our clients,” he said.

The BWTB opened just last month, and who those clients are — or turn out to be — will come in time. (Early comers with experimental technologies prefer to remain anonymous.) But Bechtel already is testing four different distributed antennae systems and just completed work for a company testing nano cell technology. That's right, a 10 × 10 × 17-inch GSM cell site is now in its third phase of testing. “That's cool,” MacLeod said, with the same reverence he spoke of “the blast” he had in his early days managing microwave paths all the way from Fort Worth to El Paso.

It's hard to believe MacLeod has been at this wireless gig for nearly three decades. And it's hard to believe he leaves it all at the office when he goes home, that he doesn't make line-of-sight configurations with the peas on his plate or toy with the light-refracting properties of his water glass. At home, MacLeod calls himself a wood butcher. “I make a lot of sawdust,” he said.

But charting a course for the advancement of mobile technologies and making it happen is what MacLeod does best. He cut his teeth on mobile radio, working with cellular precursors Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS) and IMTS-B circa 1980. While serving as what he likes to call “the number two man at Pagenet,” MacLeod was among the first to promote the then-unpopular concept of cell sectorization. “We were nearly crucified for it,” he said.

There, MacLeod's team was the first to submit filings to the FCC using the nonstandard computerized propagation models developed by CompuCom. Later, he spent nine years at Hughes Network Systems helping establish its cellular business.

That's partly why Bechtel President George Conniff gave him a blank sheet of paper in May 2000 and told him to define what it would take for Bechtel to become a true turnkey supplier in the telecom industry. From MacLeod's one-page plan came the BWTB.

Bechtel already does radio frequency engineering, network engineering design and conceptualizations, site preparation studies, right-of-way planning and acquisition, equipment and vendor procurement, and civil work and construction logistics management. The BWTB adds the one element that carriers and vendors can't get from their own laboratories: the elements themselves.

MacLeod may not be able to duplicate the hurricanes he battled in Corpus Christi while restoring coastal harbor radios or the watermelon patch where the morning dew acted like a mirror and caused a 180-degree phase cancellation on a southern microwave radio path. But his BWTB offers a real-world situation for testing true performance under high interference conditions. “You want to emulate a high-rise dense urban vertically distributed data acquisition system? We can do that,” he said.

It's hard to simulate interference or clouds and line-of-sight problems in a lab, said Richard Dean, program director at consulting firm IDC. “But the real-world test environment is one more iteration of value that companies can look to in order to validate an idea.”

The goal of the BWTB is to provide clients — both operators and vendors — with the real story about what they can expect from a network element, and to offer proof that when a vendor says it can interoperate, it can interoperate in a way that goes beyond the spec sheet.

A lot of times, new companies come along and take the equipment specifications as gospel, MacLeod says. They build their business plans around them and get funding based on them. But when they implement those specs and find out that the throughput promised was based on laboratory conditions and the field results are only 70% or even 50% of what they expected, that seriously affects operational and capital expenses and the overall margin expectations of the business.

That goes for the industry stalwarts as well. They are very concerned (and rightly so) about the quality of their networks, and every penny has to be carefully scrutinized, MacLeod said. Dean agreed: “In an environment where R&D dollars are pretty scarce, it might be a difficult sell. However, the concept is a solid one.”

The new lab is the only outdoor wireless network test range in the country. It has on-demand access to almost every frequency an operator might want to test. Three cell sites operate across 16 square miles (plans call for four more). It has one kilometer of aerial fiber for testing distributed antenna systems and RF-over-fiber and a mobile switching center outfitted with InterWave equipment and cell site electronics. It uses Ceragon DS-3 microwave equipment to backhaul traffic from the cell site to the switch.

But most important, MacLeod said, is his handpicked team of engineers. “These guys are extraordinary at defining procedures that will characterize equipment properly. I have one guy who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on power control for UMTS systems. That's awesome, too.”

Bechtel doesn't make vendor recommendations. It just tells it like it is. It does recommend certain paths for network evolution based on the empirical knowledge it gains from real-world testing — a habit MacLeod just can't seem to get away from. Most of all, results from the lab provide Bechtel clients with a comfort level they can't find anywhere else, he says. And despite the economy, MacLeod said clients are more likely — not less — to take the time and spend the money on due diligence.

“There has been a blanket of sanity put over the industry, and now everything has to be questioned,” McLeod said. “And that's prudent.”