World in Motion
From portable phones to portable offices
AT&T WIRELESS: Keeping up with demand
Cell phones are for people in motion, designed to go everywhere the user goes. Normally, when in motion the system works so that the user moves from one frequency site into another with the system sensing the change and performing a handoff to the next frequency. But sometimes the system gets congested. The handoff doesn’t occur, and the call is dropped or the degradation of quality makes the call impossible.
Or sometimes there are so many calls coming from one concentrated area — say the corridor around the Las Vegas Convention Center during COMDEX — that the frequencies are just plain overloaded. Either the quality of the calls suffers, or cellular customers experience blocked calls, automatic busy signals or dropped calls. There are, after all, only so many frequencies available. And with areas such as the convention center experiencing tremendous demands on cellular activity during events such as COMDEX, there’s an ever-greater need to expand.
Which is why in 1999, AT&T Wireless invested $2 million in infrastructure in the state and anticipates increasing that amount in 2000. “We won’t stop there,” says Neal VanCitters, vice president and general manager of operations in the Nevada district. “We’ll continue to make investments. We have aggressive plans to stay ahead of growth and stay ahead of visitor traffic and … innovative solutions that will allow us to increase capacity as well.”
AT&T Wireless has beefed up systems at many sites by 40 percent and added new facilities at the Sands and Las Vegas convention centers, improvements that were in place by last November’s COMDEX show and carried on into the Millennium celebration. In the convention corridor, the company installed additional voice paths above and beyond what’s needed on a day-to-day basis and increased paths to handle the peak demand those areas receive during events.
Increasing available voice paths happens by adding facilities, says VanCitters, either in the form of stand-alone towers or antennas installed onto the outside of buildings. The antennas can be masked in a variety of ways and most of the time people don’t even know they’re there.
“We increase service level and capacity by expanding existing facilities [in a market],” VanCitters notes. “We add additional capacity and equipment to maximize the number of voice paths in that particular facility, and do that before we go to the community to ask for another new facility.” Existing facilities are maxed out before the company goes looking for new ones, because the FCC limits the number of available frequencies. The only way to expand capacity is to add facilities and reuse frequencies, although multiple facilities can use the same frequency as long as they’re spread far enough apart.
Currently, AT&T Wireless is concentrating on Las Vegas. In Reno, says VanCitters, cellular traffic patterns don’t warrant the same sort of changes, although new facilities have been installed in Carson City and in Washoe Valley. In addition, the company will continue to work on those areas in the coming year and introduce a variety of additional sites and frequencies. AT&T Wireless has introduced a multiple network handset that operates from 850 mH to 1900 mH (referred to as the PCS frequency), enabling users to utilize both, and also offering users a multi-faceted wireless tool.
GOING WIRELESS:
Demanding the office keep up
Not too many years ago, the buzz around business was the coming of the paperless office. While for most businesses it isn’t here yet, the latest trend is the wireless office. As many businesses turn toward fluid, flexible offices where communication between team members is as crucial as any other element, wireless office components are moving into play. Products range from cellular phones that tie into the building’s PBX system, leaving the employee free to have one phone that travels with him to any work station, to work stations that travel as well. Also emerging are privacy walls with voice and data ports, actual junction boxes on the station itself and termination points boxes that come within the furniture system itself instead of a hard termination box in the wall. And while there’s the fact that most businesses are more connected to wires than before, with faxes, phones, extensions, computers and the like, solutions are coming along — such as printers that work on infrared connectivity rather than wire. There are even companies working on wireless LAN PC cards that will allow laptop users to go online, utilize email and contact their networks, all without wires.
While it looks unlikely the paperless office is coming anytime soon — there are still unexpected power failures and most workers want a hard copy back up — there’s a possibility the wireless office many soon be a reality.
