With tower companies and carriers facing difficulties getting permission to build sites at local zoning boards and collocation increasingly becoming a favored business model, CoLocation Technologies Inc. is marketing a solution designed to facilitate collocation.
Based in Atlanta, CoLocation Technologies was formed initially to market a product developed by Scientific Research Corp. called SpectraShare. The company plans to expand its product and service offerings in the future to include other collocation-related tools, said Kevin Garrett, president of the company.
“We’re seeing more and more communities saying they want the technology, but they don’t want it in their backyard,” said Garrett. “We think SpectraShare is a unique product that addresses the concerns of carriers, tower companies and zoning officials.”
The key to SpectraShare is it reduces the number of antennas required at a site by allowing a single antenna to take in a variety of signals and then distribute the signals to the appropriate base station. The SpectraShare box is installed between the base station equipment and the coax cable that runs to the antenna. The system works with existing antennas and equipment, said Garrett.
For now the system is designed for personal communications services networks, but Garrett said the system is air-interface independent and could be applied to a variety of services, including cellular and enhanced specialized mobile radio.
Carriers increasingly are viewing their towers as real-estate assets that provide revenue opportunities, said Garrett. Most carriers have embraced collocation, and several carriers have sold their tower portfolios to independent tower management companies in order to raise capital for their core business concerns.
Many existing sites, however, were not built with collocation in mind and can’t be structurally enhanced to support more tenants. SpectraShare allows those towers to support tenants they normally would not be able to support, Garrett commented.
With only one antenna per site, new towers also can be built smaller while still accommodating several carriers, said the company. In addition, disputes over which carrier gets the prime spot at the top of towers are resolved because each tenant essentially gets an equal position on the tower.
SpectraShare can be used to combine antennas at sites that already are collocated to free up physical space for other tenants, such as paging carriers and public safety, providing another source of revenue for carriers or tower companies, said Garrett. The system also allows sites where it has not been feasible to collocate, such as church steeples and flagpoles, to support more than one tenant.
Garrett said the product creates a win-win situation because tenants can reap benefits from the system as well, including faster time to market and lower construction costs.
BellSouth Cellular Corp. has conducted a technical trial of the SpectraShare system at one of its cell sites in Augusta, Ga. Gordon Wiles, director of RF engineering at the company, said its trial of the system included drive tests before and after the system was installed to compare coverage with and without the SpectraShare system.
Wiles said the test showed coverage did not change using the system. To further test the system, BellSouth asked two other personal communications services carriers to hook into the system at the site. Drive tests with other carriers on the system also showed no signal degradation, said Wiles.
“From a technical stand point, (SpectraShare) is a product that is approved for use in our networks,” said Wiles, who noted the company now is developing a business case for the product.
Wiles said the product is particularly beneficial in situations where zoning is difficult or on towers that cannot structurally support any more antennas.
“It requires some modifications to the base station equipment, but those costs are minor compared with the collocation revenue opportunities it provides,” said Wiles.
Wiles also noted the SpectraShare system is not a catch-all solution, but instead called it a tool for collocation. One concern about the product is whether it can work with signal enhancing equipment like low-noise amplifiers and high-power filters, said Wiles.
Garrett concedes there could be situations where the SpectraShare system would not work, particularly in situations where carriers do not agree on the direction they want their antennas to point. In those cases, Garrett said the company hopes to offer new applications that would allow more flexibility.
