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I attended and spoke at the NEDAS show in New York City this year. What a great show! I got to hear the experts talk about new technology and real world problems. I was there for both days, attending all the sessions. Let me tell you, if you think that new technology will solve all the problems, then wake up. What you get from this is to hear what the people out in the field are really dealing with and some ideas to avoid the mistakes and problems that they have run into.
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This was my opportunity to learn from the best. NYC is one of the toughest markets to do business and one that you should not tackle unless you talk to these people first. It will help you break into the other markets and learn what to do and what not to so.
I want to personally thank all the people that worked so hard at the show and thank them for having me speak. I want to thank Ilissa, Amy, Jennifer, and Nikki for working so hard to make this happen. They did an outstanding job to make this a fabulous event!
Day 1, April 5th, 2016
I got to attend the first day, April 5th, sessions that covered some great stuff. To me, a deployment guy hat installs DAS and small cell systems, I learned that a lot of people deal with the problems that I have seen. First off, shortcuts are great if they don’t cause you more problems. For instance, don’t forget to do the site survey of every floor when doing indoor DAS systems. Ed Donelan of Telecom Infrastructure Corp talked about how the site survey needs to be done properly and that you can’t take the word of the maintenance guy for what each floor is like. He mentioned how when one guy did a survey the landlord said all the floors were like the first one they looked at. What the landlord meant was the size and space. What the survey guy thought he meant was that there was a lowered ceiling on every floor. Needless to say, the ceilings on all the other floors were not lowered and it took the carrier years to properly run DAS through all of the floors because they had to find alternative routes. This was a real show stopper that took, the installation from taking months to taking years. A great lesson learned and the one thing that we need to so is plan ahead, measure twice cut once, however you want to look at it, the survey matters, a detailed survey. This is true in any aspect of wireless work.
Another talk was given by Tom Chamberlain of Westell. He brought up a real problem with indoor DAS called Near-Far. This problem arises when you have the outdoor signal bleeding into the indoor system and the device tries to lock onto it, making the device work harder and causing problems. This degrades performance and kills the battery. He showed real life examples of the problem and how Westell has a solution. It was a great representation of how to deal with problems that may be completely out of your control.
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One of my favorite presentations was by Gerrard Carroll of Empirix, because they had the most amazing example of analytics that you could possibly use on any wireless systems. What it would do is take a sample of the system holistically. Why does this matter? If you have ever had to troubleshoot system problems, then you wouldn’t ask that question. There is no easy way to break it apart normally but now you can look at each segment of the network to identity a bottleneck or failure. What do you look for? Better question, what are you looking for? This package captures everything and you need to break out what you need to troubleshoot problems. that depends on what you want to see. The value this adds is immense because you can tell exactly where the problems could be in the system. If you have a throughput issue you can quickly determine whether it is on the backhaul, fronthaul, or over the air to the device. Don’t forget that some devices perform much better than others. We could learn if the DAS system is performing as it should be or if there is an issue elsewhere. It was a big data solution that will allow you to specify the specific analytics that you need, but it has the capability to collect everything, literally, on the system. I think this would be useful for any wireless system and I see great value in adding this. In fact, I spoke to people that want to investigate this solution. All I can say is, WOW!
Finally, for all of you fans of connecting through satellite, we a solution that Robin Gamble of Persistent Telecom had where he would be able to take the LTE system and cram it into one small box to avoid the problems you would have getting back to the core. This is an independent system that you could run a micro system in case you lose the connection to the core. He also had a satellite provider there to speak of how the satellite industry is putting amazing new birds into space with new antenna technology that will blow open the bandwidth that goes through them. It looks great and it is here now. They already can support LTE. They are also working with LEO satellite, not just the geo stationary birds to improve latency. It will be a game changer! I believe this may really help FirstNet and all remote providers here in North America, but they can cover the world! Really amazing stuff!
To get the picture you really had to be there, I recommend spending an extra day at these events where it is very intimate, you can talk to any of these people and get advice and guidance of how to move ahead through these common problems. Like when you readers asked me to write the Wireless Deployment Handbook for Small Cells, CRAN, and DAS, it was all about helping you avoid the mistakes that I have already made. Trust me, I made plenty.
Remember that they have many upcoming events, you can see them all at www.nedas.com, but to list a few, July 3rd they will be in Boston, September 21 they will be in Washington DC, and in October they will be in Toronto. Go to www.nedas.com to see them all. If you want to know more about small cells and DAS and learn from the best, I suggest attending these events!
If you want to see the day 2 videos, go to https://www.nedas.com/events/nedas-spring-in-building-wireless-summit-nyc for all of them.
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