DENVER – It’s a glitzy, ostentatious spectacle that has drawn hundreds of powerful politicians, thousands of TV cameras, tens of thousands of convention-goers and an audience that stretches across the globe. And it has coaxed out all corners of the wireless industry, too.
The Democratic National Convention here is in full swing, waiting with bated breath for Sen. Barak Obama’s acceptance speech this evening in front of 75,000 people at Denver’s Invesco Field football stadium. It’s an event more than a year in the making, and for the past week it has been splashed across front pages, primetime TV, Web sites and most other barometers of the American consciousness.
So it should come as no surprise that the wireless industry – carriers, technology vendors, network providers, content firms and the like – are coming out of the woodwork to check out the hoopla. Like the seemingly endless “I (heart) Obama” T-shirt vendors scattered across downtown Denver, players in the wireless industry smell money.
“I build the network around the opportunity,” explained Craig Niemeyer, president and CEO of WiMAX vendor Nth Air. Niemeyer was in Denver Monday to plug his company (a “wireless broadband service provider,” he carefully explains) to the bigwigs flying in from far and wide.
Drinking the Kool-Aid
A few weeks ago, Nth Air installed a WiMAX base station to provide fixed (“nomadic” in Niemeyer parlance) wireless service to anyone within 10 miles of the Pepsi Center, which is ground zero for the Democratic Party’s love-fest. Niemeyer said the service, running on a network kit from Fujitsu Network Communications, provides speeds of up to 10 megabits per second and is perfect for DNC “reporters or city officials who may simply not have time to head back to their hotels to file stories or transmit important information to each other.”
Nth Air primarily sells fixed 3.65 GHz WiMAX as a back-up or replacement for businesses’ wired Internet connections; for $500 per month, customers get 3 Mbps service. Nth Air offers connections on a wholesale basis, meaning other companies resell Nth Air’s WiMAX service to end users. The company counts networks and customers in Las Vegas; San Jose, Calif.; and elsewhere.
Though Nth Air typically launches new markets at the behest of paying customers, Denver is a little different. Niemeyer said the company counts one official customer: Frank Ohrtman, who has written several books on WiMAX – and, according to Niemeyer, has “drunk the Kool-Aid” – is now working to sell Nth Air-based WiMAX services here. Further, Ohrtman didn’t pay the standard upfront fee to get Nth Air’s WiMAX up and running. Why? “I rolled the dice. I like Frank,” Niemeyer explained. “And we give him (an individual) the breadth and depth to be a carrier.”
Plus, Niemeyer adds, Nth Air is testing its WiMAX service with another, unnamed tier-one carrier in Denver.
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Big guns play too
Smaller companies like Niemeyer’s aren’t the only ones hunting for opportunity in the sun-drenched streets of downtown Denver this week. Indeed, Verizon Wireless mixed standard advertising tactics (billboards on the sides of city buses, for example) with guerrilla marketing.
Although there were no actual guerrillas used, the nation’s No. 2 wireless provider dispatched a gang of 20-somethings atop Segways to pass out fliers along Denver’s 16th Street Mall, and – even more impressive – the carrier let loose a Test Man lookalike (known to anyone with a TV as the “Can you hear me now?” guy) and at least a dozen hardhat-toting lookalike engineers to wander among Denver’s protesters, police and assorted gawkers. The group offered one reddened reporter a Verizon Wireless-branded bottle of sunscreen.
The DNC is “a great opportunity to showcase America’s most reliable network,” said Melanie Braidich, head of Verizon Wireless’ Colorado operations, toeing closely to the carrier’s longtime advertising catchphrase. “It’s an opportunity for exposure.”
Verizon Wireless positioned a Cell on Wheels near the Pepsi Center to handle extra traffic.
Though Braidich would not say how much Verizon Wireless spent on its marketing, she said the carrier doled out $102 million last year on its Colorado network. For the DNC specifically, she said Verizon Wireless added three new, permanent cell sites in downtown Denver as well as a Cell on Wheels (COW). Braidich said the improvements, which also include software upgrades and additional signal boosters and repeaters, quadrupled Verizon Wireless’ data capacity and doubled its voice capacity in the area.
And the work was necessary: Braidich said data traffic has doubled during the convention, and voice traffic has increased by 66%.
“We’ve got our network team down here 24 hours a day, monitoring the network,” she said. “Everything has been very smooth.”
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But for all its bluster, Verizon Wireless is playing second fiddle to AT&T Mobility, the nation’s largest carrier and the official wireless provider for the 2008 Democratic National Convention. AT&T Mobility too installed new equipment and software in anticipation of the event, and is rolling in COWs where necessary (and AT&T Mobility marketers also were passing out sunscreen yesterday).
More than 100 T-1 lines
Dave DelFava, senior director of services in North America for network-installation company ADC, headed up work on AT&T Mobility’s Denver network during the past 9 months. Joining DelFava was a handful of ADC employees and an additional 20 contractors from Denver-based Spectrum Construction.
A soft-spoken man with a penchant for sneakers, DelFava explained that coverage is not really an issue anymore when it comes to wireless, especially in a major metro area – instead, in the new, 3G world, it’s all about capacity.
“You’ve got that constant demand with data; you really just need more capacity than ever before,” he said.
DelFava said AT&T Mobility was keen to blanket the Pepsi Center with so much coverage and capacity that users – which during the DNC include some of the nation’s most powerful figures in media and politics – would take notice. To that end, DelFava said AT&T Mobility essentially turned the Pepsi Center into an enormous cell site.
Rather than pipe in coverage from an outside tower (a standard tactic for most in-building coverage), AT&T Mobility layered the inside of the 21,000-seat Pepsi Center arena with 23 of ADC’s Main InterReach Fusion Hubs, 25 Expansion Hubs and 92 Remote Antenna Units – all of which tie into more than 100 T-1 lines for backhaul. Before the DNC, DelFava said AT&T Mobility counted only a handful of T-1 lines for backhaul.
The goal, DelFava explained, is to ensure that coverage inside the Pepsi Center supersedes, or dominates, the coverage available from towers outside of the venue, thereby ensuring users remain on the most effective cell site for their location.
A “base station hotel” sits atop the Convention Center in Denver.
Photo credit: Dave Kaye
Interestingly, DelFava oversaw a similar build at the Denver Convention Center, across the street from the Pepsi Center, for the DNC. However, the network ADC built inside the convention center is shared among AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel Corp. and T-Mobile USA Inc. On the top level of the convention center’s parking structure, a low-slung, metal shed houses the base stations for each carrier’s traffic, with a separate access door for each. DelFava called it the “base-station hotel.”
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// found at http://corp.brightcove.com/legal/terms_publisher.cfm.
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Sprint Nextel, the nation’s No. 3 carrier, said its DNC-related enhancements include new iDEN and CDMA equipment and bi-directional amplifiers at more than 25 hotels. The carrier said it also will deploy a COW for Obama’s acceptance speech tonight.
Jostling for eyeballs
Though critical, network coverage is only part of wireless’ story at the DNC. Vendors, small and large, used the event to tout their wares and generate interest.
Credit-card-processing company First Data, with headquarters in Greenwood Village, Colo., managed to get space inside one of the DNC’s media pavilions (sitting alongside space for outlets such as Newsweek and the Associated Press) to show off its new contactless payment product. The offering uses Near Field Communications technology to complete credit-card transactions, allowing card holders to wave their card across a reader rather than swipe it.
Separately, MoJiva introduced MoBlogga.com during the convention, a mobile site that the company said aggregates the Web’s most popular political blogs. MoJiva promotes itself as a “one-stop solution for advertisers and publishers who want to break into the mobile advertising market.”
And, on the lighter side, regional, flat-rate carrier Leap Wireless International Inc. commandeered the side of Jet Hotel in downtown Denver to display its “Pop Art” project. A nighttime projection on the side of the hotel allowed passersby to “chime in on relevant political issues via MMS messages,” according to the company.
Despite such enterprising efforts, the wireless industry largely failed to top the exploits of the Democratic nominee himself, who used text messaging to alert almost 3 million (according to Nielsen Mobile) cellphone owners of his choice for vice president.
Nonetheless, there were signs that the wireless revolution that the industry keeps hoping for is still some ways off. The official Web site for the convention outlines the extensive wired telecommunications setup in the Pepsi Center (43 miles of cables, 160 miles of copper, 3,000 data lines, 2,500 voice-grade circuits) but makes no mention of the wireless spectrum in use. And, perhaps more telling, the DNC’s official wired telecom carrier (Qwest Communications International Inc.) was at one point charging $1,000 for one-time Internet access inside Invesco Field for tonight’s acceptance speech. Those with experience in wireless scoffed at such a price, knowing that there are at least a half-dozen different wireless connections to be had in the same location for a far lower price tag.
But if the wireless industry continues to promote itself and its services, via guerrilla tactics or otherwise, that may change.
