Tools That Do It All

Site-mapping tools are moving into every department of wireless companies.

Cell-site-mapping tools traditionally have been used for RF planning. Today, Web-based cell-site-mapping tools allow carriers to locate new sites, enhance their networks, track assets, optimize networks and improve customer service.

Dave Snyder, Crown Castle CTO, predicted that wireless carriers will start using mapping tools more frequently, for a variety of applications, now that computers have become powerful enough to run high-end geographic information systems (GIS), and mapping software has become more affordable.

"Mapping GISs are going to make a big difference in the way wireless carriers do business over the next five years," Snyder said. "I think these systems will do what spreadsheet programs such as Excel and Lotus did in the '80s and '90s; GIS will be a common laptop tool that a lot of people use."

Site Locators Web-based site locators are the latest tools offered by tower companies to wireless carriers. In October, Crown Castle revised its Web site, adding a site-locator tool using MapInfo's MapXtreme software. Carriers can log onto the Crown Castle Web site and find any of the company's towers, starting with a view of the world. The Web site allows users to drill down to a state, and then down to a specific tower. At the cell-site level, the locator tool gives detailed information about the surrounding area, including nearby roads and landmarks, as well as actual CAD drawings of the cell sites. Right now, CAD drawings of most Crown Castle towers are available on the company's Web site. Snyder said the rest of the CAD drawings would be up by year-end.

"You can see how the compound is laid out, the height of the tower, and what antennas already are on the tower," Snyder said. "We designed the new Web site to be a very powerful tool to help carriers that are looking to expand their footprints to find cell sites that fit into their networks."

In the past, Crown Castle gave carriers a CD with all of its sites on it, and carriers could download the information into their own mapping tools, then plot the sites themselves.

"The process worked fine, but with a Web-enabled mapping system, the information always is current," Snyder said. "We download new files every night so the information is as real-time as we possibly can have it."

SpectraSite also has a site locator on its Web site, allowing carriers to search for towers by MTA/BTA, latitude/longitude, city/state and tower-ID number. When a user drills down to a particular tower, the Web site provides the tower's address, its status, its latitude/longitude, elevation, height and type. The Web site also provides photographs of the tower, of the compound, and panoramic photographs of northern, southern, eastern and western views.

American Tower's "Find a Site" feature allows users to search for tower sites by ID number, country, state, zip code, MTA and latitude/longitude. Once the user drills down to a tower, the Web site provides a close-up map of the cell site. If the user types in the tower's ID number, he can view a brochure that details the site's specifications and tower data as well as a photograph of the tower.

A User's Perspective Derek Dragisich, Nextel radio-frequency engineer, said Nextel uses Crown Castle's site locator for several purposes. First, if Nextel needs coverage in a certain location, its first step is to use existing structures in order to avoid zoning issues and other problems down the road.

"I go on to the Crown Castle Web page and see if Crown Castle has any towers in the area where we are looking to have coverage," Dragisich said.

Other times, if Dragisich knows of an existing tower in a certain area, he will go to Crown Castle's Web page to see what heights are available on the tower, and if the tower will solve Nextel's coverage needs.

Nextel has its own in-house site-acquisition team, and the company has found that hopping onto the Crown Castle Web page to search for existing towers in certain areas is much easier than sending site-acquisition specialists out to find towers.

"Time is money, especially with site-acquisition people that get paid to find towers," Dragisich said. "If we can locate towers online, it saves time because it gets us the information we need faster. It also gets us to generate revenue on a tower faster, because if it takes an extra two weeks for someone to find a tower and find out who owns it, that is two weeks that the cell site could have been turned on."

Snyder said Crown Castle hopes its new Web-based site locator will help other carriers save time and money as they acquire sites. Carriers sometimes pay $4,000 to $5,000 to third-party site-acquisition firms simply to find towers, he said. He hopes that providing information about Crown Castle's towers on its Web site will help carriers do more of the legwork themselves.

"We look to give the carrier an alternative to third-party site-acquisition firms and make site-acquisition firms more aware of our sites and get them information faster," Snyder said.

Dragisich said that although Web-based site-mapping tools might reduce the amount of hours spent on site acquisition, they wouldn't completely eliminate the need for third-party site-acquisition companies.

"There always will be a need for third parties because a lot of times there is no tower where we want coverage, and in more urban or suburban areas, towers are not even a practical possibility, and we need to place antennas on a roof or something else," Dragisich said. "It is up to site acquisition to contact building managers and work out lease terms, and that process will not go away."

Location-Sensitive Data By integrating site-mapping tools into a carrier's database, wireless companies can combine information from all systems to better maintain their networks, provide real-time information to customers when they call with network problems, and even find the most ideal locations for new retail outlets.

Snyder said MapInfo's mapping tools hook into Crown Castle's Oracle database, which is where the company keeps the data on all its cell sites. By combining the information, Crown Castle can provide wireless carriers even more in-depth information on its cell sites.

"For instance, new entrants may want to know exactly where we have sites in terms of a group, so they will download a group of sites; but an existing carrier may just be interested in where its particular antennas are on a tower," Snyder said.

But carriers can take mapping tools a step further by integrating their own site data or data from tower companies into the carrier's own customer database. Rich Neville, Xmarc manager, product marketing, noted that by feeding information from RF-modeling tools into its Cellular Network Cartridge (CNC) platform, carriers can improve their network-management, customer-care, and marketing and sales departments. For instance, when customers call in requesting credit for dropped calls, CSRs can use location technology to pinpoint their location on a map.

"If they see a pattern, and if other CSRs are getting the same type of calls in that area, it can be flagged and sent to the network-management people to keep track of dropped calls," Neville said.

Sales and marketing professionals also can take advantage of location tools. When the marketing department is trying to figure out where to situate a new point-of-service (POS) location, it could combine coverage data with customers' home addresses and current POS locations to evaluate the best place to put a new store.

"Stores can't be too close together, yet carriers also want to be in areas that are convenient for current customers so that they don't have to drive around town to look for stores," Neville said. "Location tools can help find areas with large concentrations of customers that have no store adequately serving their areas."

Conversely, when carriers fire up new towers and expand coverage, they can combine a coverage map with the customers' addresses to generate mailers notifying them of the improvement.

Neville said U.K.'s Vodafone is one wireless carrier that has integrated its database with an interactive visual interface to optimize service quality. Vodafone tracks every aspect of the physical network, including tower location, cell size and coverage, RF frequencies, subscriber density and call density. It chose Xmarc's CNC platform to incorporate temporal information with inherently spatial data. By having an integrated, visual view of the network, Vodafone maintains quality of service while adding new service and reducing churn. The network-management team uses the system to view problem areas on network maps, drilling down to 100m x 100m blocks, then analyzing RF usage in the network for planning purposes. Customer service uses CNC to locate customers calling in with problems and to identify coverage problems in their areas, as well as to analyze and forecast network usage to predict potential problems. And, marketing and sales anticipate where it may need to split cells or add equipment by overlaying customer-demographic information and call-usage information.

"We allow Vodafone to turn data into color-coded maps so it can now see a red area, which has bad processing power, or a blue area, which has good processing power, and all the shades in between," Neville said. "When you pull up the map of downtown London, Vodafone can zoom in and see what is going on there."

Scott Petronis, MapInfo telecom industry marketing manager, noted that combining demographic information with MapInfo's tools would give carriers an advantage over the competition. Once a cell site is in the database, a carrier can highlight it, map it, then query the database for the population density within a 3-mile radius or the number of businesses within three miles of the site.

"Site planning is more than filling a hole," Petronis said. "Service providers want to know if a tower is near a large population of cows or a population of 30-somethings with an average annual household income of $75,000."

Mapping tools tie into decision support, allowing carriers to make solid business decisions based on all the facts: Is the terrain mountainous or flat? Is the area rural or suburban? What are the area's demographics? What is the ratio of home ownership to rentals?

"This detailed information in map format allows carriers to really target their wireless offering," he said.

Nextel finds Web-based site locators helpful, but some improvements would make the tools easier to use, according to Derek Dragisich, Nextel radio-frequency engineer. First, he would like to be able to access a tower company's list of sites in one spreadsheet.

"If I am doing something at a higher level, say I want to find all of the coordinates for all our Crown Castle sites across a market, I might have 75 of them in that market," he explained. "Rather than having to go 1-by-1 on the Web site and finding the specific tower I need, it would be easier to just have the coordinates for all of them so I could quickly pinpoint that site and find all of the information I need."

Since Dragisich made the suggestion, Crown Castle has updated its Web site, and that feature is now available. Site locators for SpectraSite and American Tower also allow carriers to download lists of their cell sites in spreadsheet format. SpectraSite lists its towers by tower ID, latitude/longitude, site address, city, state, zip code, height, structure type and manufacturer. American Tower's sites can be accessed via site name, FCC number, tower number, address, city, county, state, region, latitude/longitude and structure type.

Dragisich also requested that tower companies make their Web sites more user-friendly with explicit instructions about what each field or button on the Web page does.

Dave Snyder, Crown Castle CTO, said the updated Web site includes these changes as well.

"It also increased the speed of the maps by a factor of three, so the maps should come up significantly faster," he noted.

Last, Dragisich noted that placing potential or upcoming towers on Web sites, marking them with different colors or flags to set them apart from completed sites, and indicating when the sites will be available would be helpful to wireless carriers.

"If we don't know of a tower in an area, but there is going to be one there in a few months or even a year, it would help our strategic planning process," he said. "Who knows? As soon as the tower goes up, we might be ready to hang our antennas, rather than starting from step one with acquisition."

"I believe that feature will be implemented, but not just yet," Snyder responded. "We are looking at a way to implement project tracking - in other words, we can show the status of a tower build or antenna installation to a selected customer, but they would have to log on with a particular ID. That is where you get into e-commerce: A particular customer with particular profile would be able to see particular things about the portfolio."

Crown Castle is working with customer-focus groups as part of its e-commerce initiative to evaluate what other features and functions they would like to see on the Web site, Snyder said.