Backroad Warriors

Warning: For urban site technicians who are utterly bored with their work, the following may inspire a change of scenery or make you better appreciate your own circumstances.

Bringing the hinterlands ubiquitous wireless service requires putting sites beyond the interstates that pass through them. Migrating past those friendly confines, however, can land sites in wild environments where the climate and terrain are hostile to towers and the technicians who service them. But you have no choice as the bottom line drives your mission.

Part of the Food Chain

Alaska remains wild enough that if you step out of the cities, you're a part of the food chain. Cell sites there are likewise thrust into the environment. The numbers speak for themselves: Routine weather-related equipment repair and replacement expenses account for 40% to 50% of Alaska Communications Systems Wireless (ACS) annual operational expenses, according to Operations Manager Nick Miller.

Last year, accumulated ice and winter winds took their toll on one 20-foot antenna that served oil companies in northern Alaska.

“It snapped in half and was hanging from a 300-foot tower over the control shack,” Miller said. “They shut the pad down for two days because it was too cold to climb. It was like a spear (hanging) over the control shack that controlled the whole oil pad.”

A more regular, but goofy, expense stems from ravens' taste for coax. Miller said that ACS Wireless replaces 4,000 feet of coax a year thanks to ravens.

Miller and his team encounter a host of situations unlike anything carriers in the lower 48 states face. ACS Wireless operates 80 sites, eight of which require commercial flights to get near. Twelve others are 4-hour round trips from the technician's office, and another 10 are accessible only by helicopter.

Three times a month, on average, ACS can't get to troubled sites due to weather, with outages lasting up to five days. With some towers placed 20 miles apart, there's little backup for downed sites. Fortunately, Alaskan subscribers seem understanding when Mother Nature knocks down their service.

“If they don't have any service, and they walk outside and can't see the top of the mountain, they know we can't get up there,” Miller said.

One site accessible only by helicopter is Cape Spencer, a quarter-mile-wide island in southeast Alaska. ACS network managers call the site “the end of the world,” because from it they can see the ocean arch, the curvature of the Earth.

Southeast Alaska, Miller describes as similar to a rainforest. Rain is the norm, but it's the fog that halts air traffic. In less than an hour, fog can completely shroud the area.

“Sometimes we'll get up there, land, and 10 minutes later the helicopter pilot will call and say, ‘We're leaving now, or you're staying,’ because the weather is moving back in,” Miller said.

Helicopters aren't cheap — $1,200 an hour. The carrier typically requires the pilot wait on technicians, in case inclement weather arrives; the fare is then half price. Technicians, though, have been stranded.

“We've had guys sleep on the floor in between racks for eight days because no one could come get them,” Miller said.

Dobson also covers southeast Alaska, with 85% of the carrier's sites on islands, according to Duffy. The carrier's technicians have had similar overnighters.

“We had two Dobson employees and two guys from Nortel inside an 8' × 16' building for four days, with a couple feet of snow outside, making Chef Boyardee,” said Tim Duffy, Dobson CTO & senior vice president of network operations and engineering.

Most technicians pass on such experiences. Miller said that only one out of five job candidates is interested enough to visit for an interview. ACS, though, has found employees who've left jobs in the lower 48 states behind.

“Every cell tech we've got, with the exception of one, we've recruited out of the lower 48 (states),” Miller said.

Rocky Mountain High

Mountaintop towers in the Four Corners region — where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet, provide Alltel's most extreme site issues, according to Frank Schueneman, Alltel vice president of network operations.

“These mountain sites are high in elevation, on the order of 7,000 feet to 11,000 feet, which brings in all kinds of environmental issues,” he said. “Such as, winter comes very quickly and goes very slowly.”

Schueneman added that it's critical to get all preventive maintenance, in addition to an antenna sweep and check of microwave hops, done before late fall. After that, it could be four months before the sites can be revisited.

Alltel's Four Corners site technicians go through survival training, learning how to avoid avalanche situations, operate snow-cat vehicles and build snow caves in case they get stranded. Like ACS Wireless and Dobson, Alltel technicians travel to remote sites only in pairs.

Powered by the Sun

In southern California and Arizona, Dobson harnesses the desert's searing sun. The carrier uses solar power to charge site batteries. Although solar power isn't a revolutionary solution, “it's the only choice you have unless you want to have a generator and lots of diesel fuel doing all the work,” Duffy said.

Given the area's extreme summer heat, Dobson with the help of Lucent has developed infrastructure that can tolerate higher temperatures. Dobson uses open cabinets to allow airflow and larger heat syncs.

Dobson also uses the microwave links to observe the site's status.

“We monitor the critical things, like battery voltage, temperature, power output, catastrophic failure, things like that,” Duffy said.

Sites in the Wind

Nextel Partners recently launched service in the flat plains of eastern Texas. When network construction began last January, the carrier had no idea what would hit it.

“Our biggest hurdle, unlike the other states we've launched, was the wind,” said Gail DeFrates, Nextel Partners director of engineering and operations, southwest area. “We did not anticipate it, but we sure found out early in the build that the wind would have a dramatic effect on us out there.”

The carrier was able to co-locate 55% of its network, but did build a handful of guyed towers. For those towers, Nextel decided to build them to exceed the FCC's windloading specifications. The wind threshold for disallowing network technicians to climb towers was 40mph above 50 feet.