NextG tries to get jump on AWS rollout

It’s only been a few months since the close of the Federal Communications Commission’s advanced wireless services auction, and carriers aren’t expected to begin using the spectrum they purchased until late this year or 2008. But the wheels are already turning at NextG Networks, as the company works out right-of-way agreements to provide carriers a way to fill in coverage holes with a distributed antenna system, or DAS.
While DAS don’t replace towers, they offer carriers with a way to beef up coverage in places such as a college campus with high usage or fill in hard-to-cover geographic areas. NextG said it has done multiple deployments with the four national carriers, with up to two carriers able to place equipment on each of NextG’s small antennas, which stand only a few feet high and can be placed on light poles.
“We’re making some really good traction,” said Bo Piekarski, VP of marketing and university programs for NextG. But it isn’t because the company is doing anything particularly stunning on the technology side, he said; it uses off-the-shelf products from major equipment manufacturers to construct its networks. Instead, the company focuses on gaining leases for rights-of-way before they’re needed, then offering access to the carriers along with NextG’s equipment.
The company’s engineering staff, he said, is dwarfed by its small army of lawyers and lobbyists, who study local laws on zoning to try to convince municipalities and college campuses to accept a series of small antennas in exchange for better cellular coverage and some of the leasing revenues.
Although carriers such as Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. have done their own DAS deployments in some markets, Piekarski said, NextG tries to anticipate the operators’ needs to make outsourcing the work to NextG a more efficient, faster solution than an in-house deployment-and since the carriers still own the equipment on the pole, they’re able to amortize the asset and help their bottom line.
Post-auction, Piekarski said, NextG started scrutinizing which carriers had won spectrum in which markets and came up with a list of municipalities in which it did not already have ready access to rights-of-way. Since then, the company’s lawyers and lobbyists have begun the work of acquiring access in the places that they think carriers are likely to want a quick time-to-market.
“Putting up a large site provides the most coverage. The problem is, how long does it take to put up that site?” Piekarski said. Acquiring the space and approvals for placing a new, conventional tower can take a year or two of tangling with local jurisdictions and zoning rules, Piekarski noted. And if a carrier manages to get space on an existing site, their equipment’s placement on the tower may not be ideal for the best coverage, he added.