Feb 1, 2005 12:00 PM,

Innovation in Site

By Jason Ankeny

About 140,000 cell towers now dot the American landscape, and you ain't seen nothin' yet. Not only are there still coverage dead spots, but as carriers upgrade their networks and strive to accommodate a growing spate of next-generation mobile services, look for tower construction and enhancement to loom as one of the major expenditures and challenges of the year ahead. Following is an examination of the technological trends, regulatory decisions and market forces that will shape the tower sector in 2005 and the lessons to be learned.

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Credit growing consumer demand for mobile multimedia as the driver behind the coming tower boom.

“As some of these high-speed services are rolling out, it pushes a large amount of bandwidth requirement out to the cell towers in order to backhaul that from the base station to the serving offices,” said Jim Tindall, vice president of product management at transport solutions provider Ceterus Networks. “It means a lot more bandwidth carriers have to provide.”

And that means more towers.

“Because of the amount of coverage they're going to have to provide, carriers may end up having to deploy more towers to get the kind of data rates they're trying to achieve,” Tindall said. “People think, ‘From company X, I can get X data rate and from company Y, I can get Y data rate,’ and a lot of that is a function of how far away you are from the tower. Tower providers are going to have to increase their coverage so the distances they are from the users is shortened. When you start talking about 3G data, you really degrade when you get too far from the tower.”

But those same next-generation mobile technologies also portend significant changes in how carriers deliver services to subscribers, which could spell major changes for tower deployment as well. Consider mobile video: Even as Verizon Wireless launches its VCast video broadcasting service over its fledgling EV-DO network, there are questions concerning the viability of offering such bandwidth-hogging services over what for all intents and purposes are primarily voice networks.

“If you're using up a lot of your bandwidth for deploying video, you're chewing up bandwidth that can be used for profitable voice calls,” said Kush Parikh, worldwide strategic marketing manager for mobile connectivity solutions at Texas Instruments, which is developing its own mobile video chip called Hollywood.

One alternative: Offload that data to an altogether different network. Qualcomm's MediaFLO network will operate via the company's proprietary FLO (Forward Link Only) multicasting technology, which transmits content to users in a one-to-many fashion at a cost Qualcomm claims is significantly cheaper than delivering comparable service over EV-DO or W-CDMA. Another unique wrinkle of MediaFLO is that by providing coverage via high-power transmitters positioned atop tall towers, Qualcomm claims the network will require about 30 to 50 times fewer towers than typical cellular and higher frequency-based networks.

Equally notable, tower operators may even provide carriers and chip developers with some competition. Tower firm Crown Castle is currently working with Nokia to trial the mobile video standard DVB-H in the Pittsburgh area, testing the standard in the 1.6 GHz frequency band that Crown Castle owns nationwide.

But in the meantime, carriers will continue building towers at an unprecedented pace — literally thousands of tower erection proposals are in front of city zoning boards across the nation, and pending FCC and U.S. Supreme Court decisions may make it easier than ever to construct new towers in sites optimized to provide maximum coverage.

One tower upgrade facing carriers has nothing to do with next-generation data services. In the wake of the series of hurricanes that savaged the southeastern U.S. during the latter half of 2004, operators are spending millions to add new and improved generators in an attempt to guarantee that their towers maintain power even in the most severe weather conditions.

You can fight city hall

At press time, the U.S. Supreme Court was close to making a ruling on a long-running dispute between Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. and Mark Abrams, a would-be entrepreneur seeking to collect damages and attorneys' fees from city officials who denied him a commercial permit for an antenna he erected in his yard.

Yeah…so? Well, it turns out the Supremes' decision could significantly impact the future proliferation of cell towers.

Abrams' case reached the nation's highest court after lower courts concluded that, according to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, with its emphasis on boosting the growth of telecommunications technologies, Rancho Palos Verdes should have granted approval of the 52.5-foot radio antenna Abrams wished to erect for a commercial taxicab, fire truck and school bus dispatch service. When the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Abrams could also collect attorneys' fees and damages from Rancho Palos Verdes, the city appealed, arguing that such money awards weren't envisioned under the Telecommunications Act. Moreover, Abrams' legal fees now exceeded $15 million — roughly Rancho Palos Verdes' annual budget.

City attorney Jeffrey Lamken argues that if all communities must face the prospect of paying massive court settlements for wrongly denying a wireless antenna or cell tower application, few would ever say no — especially if the petitioner were a national wireless carrier with deep pockets and an army of attorneys.

“I can't imagine Congress wanted to impose damages plus attorneys' fees on municipalities without even giving municipalities a chance to correct their mistake,” Justice Antonin Scalia told the court in mid-January. Justice Stephen Breyer agreed it could result in major problems “if we discovered that local zoning boards are erring too much on the side of granting these applications.”

Know your history

In late 2004 the FCC voted 3-2 to adopt the Nationwide Programmatic Agreement (NPA), a set of guidelines created to govern the impact of communications facility site-building on environmental and historic preservation. Designed to standardize carrier efforts to erect transmission towers on Native American lands and historic sites, the NPA promises to simplify the identification of historic properties, develop standardized forms for state historic preservation officers and foster improved communications with Native American tribes.

In short, the NPA seeks to streamline a complex siting approval process that has confounded carriers for years. While some historic sites and native lands are ideally located for new tower builds, current laws and regulations vary wildly from region to region, prompting some service providers to avoid potentially problematic sites altogether rather than face the gauntlet of local jurisdiction.

Although scheduled to go into effect in early March, at press time the NPA was in a holding pattern as the FCC waited on approval of some critical forms that carriers must file under terms of the accord. The formal language of the NPA document is reportedly still under revision as well.

There are also rumors that wireless operators may appeal the plan. Specifically, carriers are wary of the NPA because, as a federal “undertaking” a la roads, dams and other related projects that require historic preservation review and construction permits under the National Environmental Protection Act, the guidelines may portend more intense federal review of other tower construction proposals.

Safety is still first

The National Association of Tower Erectors (NATE) is a non-profit trade association founded in 1995 to represent the tower erection, service and maintenance sector. Now comprising more than 500 member companies throughout North America, among them such prominent wireless industry firms as Motorola, Ericsson, American Tower and Sprint North Supply, NATE will celebrate its 10th anniversary Feb. 14 to 17 with its annual conference and exposition, held this year in Dallas (site of the group's first conference a decade ago).

NATE devotes the vast majority of its energies to promoting tower erection and maintenance safety, collaborating with member companies and regulatory agencies to establish standardized guidelines that best guarantee the well-being of tower workers.

“For a long time, the tower service industry was made of companies who had been involved in this business for years, and they were great at doing what they were doing, so it was something that federal regulators didn't pay much attention to,” said Patrick Howey, NATE administrator. “When wireless communications took off in the mid-1990s, all of a sudden you were getting new companies starting, and it was apparent there needed to be some source of information on how to do this work safely.”

In the years since, NATE has worked extensively with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to improve safeguards and minimize hazards, most notably convincing OSHA officials to approve a process known colloquially as “riding the line.” “Riding the line” means hoisting a worker to the area of the tower he needs to address, as opposed to climbing to that spot — while far safer than climbing, riding the line is also more complex, requiring careful attention to lifting capacities, hoist connections and so forth. Over time, NATE established a strict series of protocols to govern riding the line, ultimately convincing OSHA to set aside its initial skepticism and grant federal authorization to the practice.

In 2004, in the wake of six tower-site deaths in three years, North Carolina became the first state to formally address communications tower safety when Labor Commissioner Cherie Berry signed into law standards requiring employers to provide 100% fall protection. NATE spent four years working with North Carolina officials to draft the legislation and is currently working toward introducing a nationwide tower safety standard.

“North Carolina wanted to bring forward some mechanism to keep people safe,” Howey said. “I'm certain their efforts will have a real impact on a federal standard.”

So despite all the bandwidth concerns and network enhancements in their future, Howey says the biggest challenge facing wireless carriers as they build out new towers remains guaranteeing the safety of tower workers.

When you are dedicated to operating safely, it costs more money,” Howey said. “The training costs money, and you have to buy the proper equipment, like harnesses, etc. Many companies keep a safety director on the payroll. But all of it is essential. It all comes down to safety.”