Wireless Wiring

Resilient cable is making continuous coverage in airports a reality.

Nary a business traveler flies today without a PDA, wireless phone or laptop computer, but airports often have been the bane of business travel, usually offering little to no in-building coverage.

Instead, travelers, who sometimes are stranded for hours in crowded terminals, have had to hunt down data ports or exclusive lounges with special wireless coverage.

In the past, in-building coverage at airports proved difficult because of airport bureaucracy and signal interference. But thanks to a group effort in the New York area, travelers have a much better chance of getting seamless wireless coverage at the airports there. At the backbone of the entire system is a cable previously not common to North American installations.

Unfamiliar Territory
The plan for seamless wireless coverage in New York airports began with an agreement between a subsidiary of Concourse Communications (www.concoursecommunication.com) and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (www.panynj.com). When the plan is fully realized, it will bring in-building coverage to many New York facilities, including the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the World Trade Center, as well as Newark, John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia airports.

The agreement also means that the system will support a range of wireless devices because the initial network was created to handle a variety of frequencies.

“This system will accommodate almost anything you can think of,” said Jim Ross, Concourse Communications president, business development. “There are obviously cell phones and PCS phones. But we’re also doing a lot of work with the wireless Internet, so you’ll be able to have a high-speed wireless connection to your laptop or PDA. And, we’re accommodating a whole host of Bluetooth devices.”

Where does an unfamiliar cable come into all this?

The airport terminals are being wired with Category V, twisted-pair cable. In the United States, the unshielded version of this cable is the industry standard, but contractor LGC Wireless (www.lgcwireless.com) recommended using a shielded version of the same cable for the airports in this project.

“If you were to go to Europe, you would find that the regulatory bodies there are much more particular, and their requirements are more stringent,” said Enrique Cuellar, LGC vice president of marketing. “Therefore, shielded twisted pair is the standard there. Here in the U.S., we’re less particular about the emissions, and the unshielded twisted pair meets all of the FCC requirements, so typically, that’s what we use here.”

Cuellar said his company suggested the less-familiar shielded cabling because the installation serves multiple carriers sharing the same cabling infrastructure.

“We recommended that shielded twisted pair be used to prevent or reduce the emissions from one cable interfering with its next-door neighbors,” Cuellar said.

LGC contracted ITT Industries, (www.ittind.com) Network Systems & Services, a company that specializes in shielded cabling, to provide the cable.

Learning Curve
At first, installation did not go smoothly.

“There’s a learning curve as the first facility goes in and is tested and tweaked and changed and modified,” said Jonathon Chauvin-Blitt, ITT president. “The first concourse took 10 months, but the remaining two concourses took three months each.”

Aurora Electric was in charge of installing the network.

“The reason the first one took a long time was because it had never been done anyplace in the world,” said Veronica Rose, Aurora president & CEO.

The first piece of equipment installed in a terminal is the hub cabinet, which is about the size of a dormitory refrigerator. A multifiber landline runs to the hubs.

“From the hub, we bring ITT’s screened Cat V cable out to a remote antenna unit, which is about the size of a deck of cards,” Rose said. “Within 6 inches of the remote antenna unit, we secure a coax cable, and we mount an antenna about the size of a credit card on the underside.”

Rose said that from the terminal, all people could see is the credit-card sized antennas that are mounted to the ceiling tiles.

The Newark airport, which went online this spring, now has nearly 57 miles of shielded cable snaking through it. The cable contains four pairs of twisted wires, each covered in a screen of polyester/aluminum tape. The cable connecters are shielded with what looks like a metallic jacket. However, because the connectors also are unfamiliar to the United States, ITT had to design a prototype male connector that would work for the installation.

Now that the learning period is over, installation at the other New York airports is going quickly. Work has begun at both JFK and LaGuardia airports, and it’s now taking less than 30 days to wire a terminal.

Continuous Coverage
Good coverage at airports often has been a thorn in the collective side of wireless carriers, and Newark airport was no exception.

“As with any older, large building, we were challenged in certain parts of the airport,” said Mike DiGioia, AT&T Wireless (www.attws.com) spokesman. “Most of our coverage was around the windows, toward the exterior of the building. As you got further toward the interior, there were some significant challenges in getting the signal there.”

AT&T began offering coverage in Newark in April. JFK and LaGuardia should be live by year-end.

Although most airports across the country offer some sort of in-building coverage, the networks usually cover only one carrier and rarely have the capacity to handle multiple frequencies or co-location. The Newark airport is the first to offer seamless wireless coverage for multiple carriers over a common system, Concourse’s Ross said.

Now that the system is being proved in the New York airports, Ross said other airports are taking notice. Concourse already is working on plans to wire the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and the Detroit Airport. Similar systems probably will start showing up in other airports as the networks become standardized, he said.

Interest in the in-building network quickly brought all of the major carriers in the New York metropolitan area to the table. AT&T Wireless, Nextel (www.nextel.com), Sprint PCS (www.sprintpcs.com), Verizon (www.verizon.com) and VoiceStream (www.voicestream.com) all have become a part of the project. In addition, Wayport (www.wayport.com) and MobileStar (www.mobilestar.com) have signed up to provide high-speed wireless LAN services to the airports.

John Battaglia, Nextel vice president of care operations, said Newark is the first airport in his area to offer continuous coverage to customers.

“In the New York area, there’s not a lot of sites that are on airport or Port Authority properties,” Battaglia said. “So, you usually have the airport ringed with sites.

“For example, we could have sites on Grand Central Parkway in New York that provide some overlapping coverage into LaGuardia airport, but there’s not a site on LaGuardia airport property that would really have the capacity to serve the demand there.”

Battaglia said one of the hardest things to coordinate during the installation was testing all of the different signals from the systems. The shielded cabling helps reduce the interference between the carriers, but outside interference also is a concern.

“When you’re trying to put in a cabling system in an airport, you always have to be careful of the frequencies and interference between the towers and the airplanes,” said Vick Mamlouk, Andrew business unit manager (www.andrew.com), distributed communications systems.

Because the cabling system at the New York airports is in the ceilings of the terminals, outside RF interference isn’t that much of a concern, Mamlouk said.

For carriers, though, using a new standard of cable isn’t nearly as exciting as creating better coverage for their customers.

“In the 18 years that I’ve been doing this, it never ceases to amaze me that folks want it to work everywhere,” Battaglia said. “Even if you tell them it doesn’t work in a parking garage that’s three floors underground, you’ll still get the question: ‘How come it doesn’t work in the parking garage down here?’ We try to stay ahead of their demand, and this is a good example of that.”