Editor:
I look to RCR for timely and appropriate information on the state of the industry. As senior real estate and construction manager for BellSouth International’s foreign cellular projects, I rely on RCR to keep me current with a window on the wireless world which I am not often privy to, due to either my project location or time considerations.
Therefore, it was with more than just passing interest that I read the article in your Sept. 16 issue by Greg Sweet of acquire Telecom Services. Greg and I worked together years ago on the West Coast in the early days of the then-SP Sprint (Southern Pacific Communications) network, Greg and his people doing the site acquisition, myself and a few other worthies doing the construction of the line-of-site radio sites and towers.
Greg and I still get together on occasion. We now have many mutual acquaintances and contacts within the industry and it looks like we still share many of the same concerns. And because it is, first and foremost, a business, the primary consideration of the industry should be generating revenue.
I find it curious that almost 20 years after Greg and I were driving all over the countryside buying, leasing and building system capacity in what was just then coming into its own, here we are in the shadow of the new millennia doing things in pretty much the same way.
Greg has touched on issues which almost everyone in the industry will acknowledge, but which few will ruminate on. Perhaps fewer still actually will champion a better way of doing what it is we do.
I can only hope that the visionaries amongst us who reside in the ivory towers take what he has said to heart and re-think their strategies.
There are, however, a few construction-related thoughts of my own I would add to what he has said, and they not only echo, but amplify his recommendations for site acquisition.
Revenues drive the process. They always have, but in the past there has always been more available time for engineering and implementation, and the issue was masked. Now, the rapidity with which the systems must be brought into service, precludes that we still conduct business in the same old tired ways.
It may not be impossible to engineer, acquire, build out and have a system on the air within four months, but you are not going to achieve a system that offers optimum coverage and operational capability; there will be a necessity for fill-in coverage, there will be myriad system fine-tuning and alignment problems, and there will be a contractual nightmare of change orders, additional costs and lost time. None of this predisposes the generation of acceptable revenue as quickly as it should be generated.
On the many international projects that I have been involved with, traditional process has usually held forth: an RF engineer, usually armed with a SPARC station, a program and a plotter, either issues the site search areas himself or verifies and issues coordinates provided to the project team by an RF contractor. The pecking order usually then cascades down to the microwave engineer for LOS verification, then to the site acquisition specialist to see what is available within the search areas, and at some point, the construction people are told what they have to work with. Construction types are always at the bottom of the chain of process, and as such, rarely have the opportunity to provide any meaningful input into the decision-making.
This typifies “Bad Process.” It worked back then, it still works now, but there is a better way. Elaborating on the same bullet items that Greg addressed from the acquisition stance, the construction issues begin at an overlap point within the site acquisition process, and then rush headlong to assume a life of their own.
1. The traditional design and implementation process, even under ideal conditions, is flawed. In the real world, coverage is dictated by a computer model whose output is highly contingent on data accuracy and timeliness, the depth of map scale for the geographic input, and the model’s ability to consider and incorporate both natural and man-made clutter. Output is only as good as input, and the site coordinates spewed forth from the computer are neither Truth nor the Word: they are only numbers, because the computer model does not have cognizance.
2. There are inherent delays in the process itself, beginning with the RF engineering effort required. To accommodate these delays and still meet your end date, you can either assign huge portions of this work to be performed prior to license award, at high financial risk, or you can wait for the award and then jam all of the necessary work into an accelerated and highly unrealistic time frame. Your start point will slip; your on-air date then will slip accordingly.
3. Without a “Hit Team” approach, where all of the disciplines involved in the site implementation process have equal final approval authority and visit primary site locations together as a team, all of the aspects of a site’s viability are not likely to be weighed and evaluated with respect to the early generation of revenues.
4. On the typical project, the “buildability” of a site is often overlooked or ignored because the RF engineer has deemed the site as critical from a coverage or operating standpoint, regardless of how long it may take to build out the site.
5. When site acquisition and construction are driven by the RF discipline, highly unrealistic time constraints which usually cannot be met are often then placed on the real estate and construction disciplines by the project management team, and this generally results in additional delays and increased costs.
6. Traditionally, the single most likely source of delays for site implementation stem from aeronautical agency approvals, zoning change requirements and construction permitting. Not taking these processes into full account and allowing time for the resulting delays in the project schedule is myopic and unrealistic.
The issue is not “How soon can we build out a system with the best available coverage?” The real issue is, “How soon can you be generating revenues from those most initially buildable sites which will provide the greatest potential revenues?” The answer is, relatively sooner, provided that RF is not the final arbiter in the approval process, and that the real estate, microwave, and construction disciplines are given equal standing and empowerment to work together in the site final approval process. This, and less of a reliance on the traditional RF-led process, are the most important elements of a “New Telecommunications Implementation Order.”
It is the business of the real estate and construction disciplines to search out and build sites as quickly as possible; there are certain inescapable time and cost impacts inherent to the process, and to hamstring the generation of revenues by imposing unrealistic and artificial RF constraints on that process is a sure recipe for a failure to meet dates. Additionally, the measures given below, can assist in meeting schedule and budget commitments when employed in concert with the foregoing recommendations:
1. Avoid the “Business Case Mentality,” where less than the worst case budget and schedule inputs from real estate and construction are used as a basis for multiple business case iterations of business development and marketing forecasts.
2. The prioritized use of all available in-house, contracted and local resources far prior to awarding a license to accurately determine property market conditions, availability of locations, permitting and approvals time frames, construction costs and the “buildability” of possible site areas.
3. Employing the reasonable use of pre-engineered and standardized system designs, equipment layouts, building and shelter plans, etc.
4. Getting away from “reinventing the wheel … ” on every aspect of each project. Take the l
essons learned from constructing past projects, and apply the wisdom to new projects.
T
hese thoughts, like Greg’s, assume that any quickly implemented system will have nulls and voids in the coverage patterns, but it will be up and on the air and generating revenue for its owners while the implementation process can continue. Maintaining the traditional processes and treating the real estate acquisition and construction implementation members of project team as unwanted but necessary elements only reinforces and fosters the perception that their participation in the project is limited, and of a lesser import than that of the radio engineering discipline. It is this perception which prevents easily built sites from providing immediate coverage and revenues, and which no longer has a place in our industry.
Mark Stephen Tigh
Senior Manager of Int’l Operations, BellSouth International.
