Nooks & Crannies

Thanks to various in-building techniques, wireless telephony isn't just for the man on the street anymore.

Early users of cellular phones are all too familiar with the dropped-call syndrome. While on the street, the caller experiences excellent reception. But once he enters a tunnel or parking garage, gets on an elevator, or attends a rock concert with screaming fans, he might as well kiss that signal goodbye.

As carrier networks first were being built, many service providers did not have the time to wire the places needing special attention in order to receive signals. But today new emphasis is being given to in-building solutions, both licensed and unlicensed.

"We see three opportunities in the market," said Enrique Cuellar, LGC Wireless vice president of marketing. "The first is more coverage - extending the macrocellular coverage to the difficult-to-reach spots," he said.

The macrocell has enough capacity, but there are shadow areas or holes that it does not cover.

Second is the need for higher-end services such as wireless-office services (WOS), he said, which generally involve the service provider's more valuable customers.

Finally there is the issue of capacity.

"As the number of subscribers and the demand increase, and since the frequencies are limited, (service providers) are forced to reuse these frequencies," Cuellar said.

This generally means reducing the size of a cell, which involves adding base stations and radio resources. In dense urban areas, a cell gets smaller and smaller, until it may become just the size of one building.

Shelly Tyler, Phillips InfoTech senior analyst, tracks the in-building industry, both licensed and unlicensed. She predicts in-building wireless revenues will surge from $161 million in 1999 to more than $893 million in 2004. Driving this is a need for mobility, improved employee productivity and improved customer service, she said.

Although there are ways to amplify a signal from the public wireless network for various in-building uses, the wireless-office solutions that integrate with a PBX or key system will provide richer features than simply using a wireless phone and a provider's public network, Tyler said.

This was the premise that AT&T Wireless Services explained to the Seattle Mariners when the new Safeco Field was being built. Now Mariner fans attending games at Safeco don't have to worry about dropped calls, while the team and stadium staff members enjoy the features of AT&T WOS.

Unlicensed Vs. Licensed As far as the market is concerned, unlicensed in-building solutions currently prevail, according to Tyler, making up 89% of the market in 1999.

For example, Nortel Networks has 8,300 unlicensed systems just in North America and 17,000 globally. Nortel's Companion system operates on the unlicensed 1.92GHz to 1.93GHz band, according to Jason Frannea, Nortel Networks enterprise solutions, wireless Internet platform. The system is very low power and exists well in conjunction with wireless LAN (WLAN) networks and other wireless networks such as the unlicensed ISM band at 2.4GHz, he said.

The Companion system works though a series of base stations installed in a building, which hand off the wireless calls and provide seamless coverage. The controller interfaces with the existing telephone system, and the handsets can share a number with a desk phone or have individual numbers.

"The building I'm in is a little less than a quarter-million square feet, and we have about 17 cells to cover the entire building," Frannea said. "You don't need one every 10 feet."

Of course when the user leaves the building or campus, the handset no longer works. Frannea said this is not necessarily a disadvantage. In many environments such as medical or retail, the company isn't interested in providing a wireless handset to employees for their off hours.

Brantford General Hospital in Toronto uses Nortel's Companion system to allow patients direct access to their caregivers. When a patient needs help, he presses a bedside call button. The system sends to call to the nursing station and simultaneously sends the call information to the primary care nurse's Companion handset, which is clipped to the nurse's scrubs. The nurse can talk directly to the patient or confer with other staff regarding that patient's care.

Nortel no longer has a licensed in-building solution. Although it introduced one in 1996, it dropped the solution two years later.

Service-provider infrastructure typically is quite expensive, Frannea said, and in many situations, licensed frequencies are not available for reuse within buildings. He noted that in a rural area, a service provider may be able to supply three channels of spectrum to a business for WOS. But if the customer then wants to set up the same kind of service in another area, there might be only one channel available, and that might not be enough.

"Nortel feels dual-mode - licensed-unlicensed - when the technology is ready, will solve the problem," Frannea said.

A dual-mode handset would operate on the unlicensed band within the business enterprise and, when the worker leaves the building, could connect to the licensed infrastructure with a slightly reduced feature set, he said.

Such a dual-mode handset could use the 802.11 WLAN infrastructure inside and the public network outside, Tyler suggested. But with three technologies currently in use by U.S. wireless-service providers, it would be difficult to achieve the kind of volume that would make manufacturing such a handset viable.

She does predict, however, that by 2004, some 46% of in-building wireless handsets will use converged voice-and-data-technology solutions. These will piggyback on WLAN access points, rather than base stations, to deliver mobile voice along with data traffic. Products have been shipping since 1999, but are just now starting to gain attention in conjunction with the explosive growth in the WLAN industry, Tyler said.

"What you're seeing are wireless ISPs such as MobilStar and Waveport that install access points in public areas, and charge users to access them," she said. The user purchases a card, which is inserted into his laptop, and then pays some sort of a flat rate to access the network.

Companies such as Symbol and SpectraLink are offering voice over WLAN, she said. Symbol is a WLAN vendor so its handset works on its own access points. SpectraLink has a system that works on the access points of its alliance partners.

In-Building & WOS In the licensed arena, AT&T Wireless Services is likely the most aggressive in providing both in-building and WOS.

Because of the interest expressed by its customers, the service provider has developed two platforms, according to Jeff Bouma, WOS product marketing manager. The 1.0 platform is used to cover more open areas such as a stadium or campus. The 2.0 platform is set up for within the four walls of a building, but might be used in a campus with multiple buildings and narrow walkways. The latter has more PBX capabilities, necessary if companies want the wireless phone to be the primary mode of communications. AG Communications and Ericsson are AT&T's two infrastructure vendors for WOS.

"The average employee moves to a different cube or office 1 1/2 times a year," Bouma said.

With WOS, the employee can take his phone with him easily. Bouma cited a study done by Sun Microsystems at its Broomfield, CO, facility, which indicated that at any given time, two thirds of the workers were away from the building. Because of this trend, many businesses offices are going to hoteling, where a worker goes to a different space each time he is in the office. WOS makes this much easier.

As 3G systems go online, there will be new challenges for wireless providers in the in-building space. As the United States will be behind other parts of the world, it might be able to benefit from experience elsewhere.

Jeff Quiram, ADC Telecommunications vice president & general manager of the broadband connectivity group, wireless division, predicts that European providers will be focused on macro coverage with 3G, but they will not wait to do in-building solutions.

"Due to the high cost of deploying these networks, they need to get all the traffic possible in order to sell enhanced services and make money," he said. "So there won't be as much of a lag between micro coverage and macro as there has been in other older networks."

LGC's Cuellar noted that in some Asian countries such as Hong Kong, in-building 3G coverage is ensured because good in-building coverage is mandated by the government.

The providers must fix the problem in a set time or face fines.

Because AT&T provides its current data service on CDPD networks, it's not part of the AT&T in-building solutions.

"With 3G this will change, and we will replicate everything we do in the macro network," Bouma said.

AT&T is rolling out EDGE at the end of 2001 and working with vendors so that its WOS equipment will be compatible.

Faculty and staff at Mississippi State University (MSU) and the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) have the option of free on-campus wireless service this school year thanks to Cellular South.

The service provider has established two networks, one on each campus, by using the macro network and placing a private system identifier (PSID) on the handsets.

"PSID is a feature that will allow faculty, staff and eventually students to talk from wireless phone to wireless phone on campus," said Terrell Knight, Cellular South director of sales.

Wireless handsets also can be used for calls to and from the campus PBX so that calls to dorm rooms and campus offices also will be free. The system uses 5-digit abbreviated dialing and includes features such as group ringing, conference calling, voice mail and text messaging.

At Ole Miss, Cellular South placed a site on a water tower. At MSU, it placed four antennas on the football-stadium light poles. Not only does this provide coverage for the PSID network, but it also allows for better public coverage at events such as football games.

"Before football games, we'll take voice channels out of certain cell sites and allocate them to the universities for that day," Knight said. "It allows us to help out on capacity, because it does become an issue."

So far the on-campus sites have provided coverage where it is needed, both inside and outside the campus buildings. If areas are found that need additional coverage, Cellular South plans to install repeaters.

The service provider uses only dual-band, dual-mode TDMA handsets - the Nokia 6161 and the 5060.

"We go in and program the PSID feature in the phone," Knight said.

The billing system was the biggest challenge in the process; it knows to rate the on-campus calls as free. Faculty and staff subscribe to a service plan and are billed for calls not made in connection with the campus network.

Cellular South hopes that its service will instill loyalty in its customers, particularly when it extends to the student body. Knight recently made a presentation to the Mississippi community college presidents and will roll out proposals to other universities and businesses.

"If you take a quick look and ask how it will pay, this is a hard one to swallow," Knight said. "But if you look as investment, it pays for itself 10-fold."

When the Seattle Mariners built a new stadium, it provided a dual opportunity for AT&T Wireless Services.

"The biggest reason we talked to AT&T was to get a cell site to serve 47,000 screaming fans," said Larry Witherspoon, vice president of IT for Safeco Field and the Seattle Mariners.

This was accomplished by connecting to the Ericsson macrocell in center field, said Jeff Bouma, AT&T wireless-office service (WOS) product marketing manager. However, AT&T also wanted to be able to serve the areas of the stadium such as the dugouts and offices where steel and concrete construction blocked the signals. So the wireless-service provider, as part of its marketing plan with the Mariners, designed a WOS solution to serve these areas using the LGCell from LGC.

The LGCell system at Safeco consists of two main hubs, eight expansion hubs, 32 remote antenna units and cabling - multimode fiber optic and twisted pair.

Enrique Cuellar, LGC vice president of marketing, said the use of LAN cabling makes the product unique.

"Until we appeared, conventional solutions used coax cabling about one inch in diameter, which was massive and heavy," Cuellar said.

LAN cabling results in a simpler and faster installation, and is subsequently cheaper, he said.

At Safeco, a rooftop antenna is connected to a LGCell, and cellular signals are used from the existing macrocell.

Staff members now can take their wireless phones with them when they leave the WOS area in the stadium and seamlessly transition to the outside network, Bouma said. Calls made by the staff inside the stadium are free through AT&T's arrangement with the team. Outside, the staff members have their regular rate plans. The Mariners provide some employees with dedicated handsets that work only inside the building.

"Eighty percent of our staff carry wireless phones and are on the wireless-office plan," Witherspoon said. " I was actually amazed at how often the phones are used from a business-support perspective. You give a guy a wireless phone, and he'll quit using his desk phone. That's pretty much happened here, especially with a facility of this size."

Witherspoon is pleased with the service, and noted that the only area of the stadium that is not covered is his data center, an oversight that AT&T can fix easily. He also is considering setting up a call-routing scheme where calls ring first at the desk phone, then the wireless phone and then go to voice mail.

The Mariners are not using AT&T's CDPD data service (actually not part of the WOS).

"Baseball front offices are fairly behind the times," Witherspoon said. "They're not ready for the other stuff yet."

ADC Telecommunications' new in-building solution has a fully digital platform that is in its first trial.

The Digivance Indoor Coverage Solution extends seamless coverage throughout a large building or a campus. ADC's patented technology digitizes the designated RF bandwidth, digitally transports it over multimode fiber, and reconstructs the signals at the far end, maintaining the high dynamic range required for higher-data-rate broadband-type services.

"The big benefit is peace of mind for providers," said Jeff Quiram, ADC vice president & general manager of the broadband connectivity group, wireless division. "Whatever they can place on their spectrum in the future will work," he said.

If operators can take a high-data-rate service and fit it into their spectrum from an RF perspective, there will be no hindrance to using that service in an in-building environment. This differs from current analog solutions where traffic characteristics of the high-data-rate services may be affected by the attenuation and loss inherent to these systems, Quiram said.

"Because the digital system allows a high dynamic range, we can't run into problems with washing out weaker signals," he said.

He also pointed out that an analog system has creep over time and will need to be rebalanced.

"We don't need to balance at all," Quiram said.

ADC has had the digital technology for about seven years, but the component cost made marketing it not feasible until now. In fact, although the cost of digital components has been going down, the cost of analog equipment is increasing, Quiram said, because the components are older and not being developed as aggressively.

"Will (the product) meet the needs two to five years from now?" he asked. "That's what determines if the product will be a key component of the network as opposed to a Band-Aid on a problem that will have to be redone."