When RF engineer David Ohanlon took a contract job working for C Spire Wireless through LCC, he thought he’d be installing small cells or a distributed antenna system. These are technologies Ohanlon knows well, but in his new job he has hasn’t spent time with either of them — his first and only project has been a stadium Wi-Fi network.
“The things that are important to Wi-Fi people are totally different than the things that have traditionally been important to RF engineering,” said Ohanlon, remembering how his Wi-Fi team scrambled to track successful and failed connections to the network, something they had never done before.
“The people are different, the tools are different and often there is animosity between the two,” said Benoit Fleury of IBwave, which develops certification curriculum for the design of in-building cellular networks. IBwave recently added more Wi-Fi training to its coursework and Fleury said that as he attends Wi-Fi conferences he hears a lot about human friction.
“I think that’s going to be the biggest challenge – it’s not going to be so much the technology to bring those two together but it’s to bring the people and the collaboration together,” Fleury said. “There’s sometimes disrespect with people coming from the cellular industry and vice versa for opposite reasons. So it’s interesting as we’re now starting to see these technologies coming a lot closer together and tracking a lot more seamlessly than before.”
Cellular and Wi-Fi are coming together but the people who deploy them approach networks very differently. Wi-Fi access points manage interference through listen-before-talk, while LTE relies on scheduled, synchronized transmissions. So the challenges are different, and so is the language.
“If you look at RF engineers’ coverage maps green is good, dark green is really good, yellow is OK, red is bad,” Ohanlon said. “Wi-Fi is the opposite. Red is hot so that’s your best, yellow is really good but not quite as good as red, light green is not so good, dark green is worse and blue is their absolute worst.” Similarly, a hot spot in a cellular network is a problem area, while a Wi-Fi hot spot is an access point or an area that is served by one.
When Ohanlon realized he’d be working on a Wi-Fi project, he decided to get certified on the Xirrus equipment he was deploying. Xirrus VP of product marketing Bruce Miller said his company is seeing more and more attempts to integrate Wi-Fi and cellular, and to integrate the wireless workforce.
“We’ve been involved in some of those projects but they haven’t quite synergized to the level that I think maybe a lot of people would hope,” said Miller. “I think this is still a developing story in terms of how well these things can be outfitted in a given location together. … They are quite different … when you look at just the footprint of the equipment itself, some of the requirements that you have, it’s not a just snap-together solution.”
Before RF engineers can attempt integration of Wi-Fi and cellular, they may need to learn more about deploying and maintaining Wi-Fi networks. Ohanlon thinks Wi-Fi certification is an investment more RF engineers should make. “I think if they don’t they will not be as valuable in the future,” he said.
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