Wireless Future Depends on Hyper-densification, IoT, Connected Real Estate–Manire

By J. Sharpe Smith

October 13, 2017

The “hyper-densification” of small cells, the Internet of Things and connected real estate are all essential to make 5G and smart cities a reality, Ross Manire, president and CEO, ExteNet System, told an audience in a keynote address at the HETNET Expo 2017, Oct 10, in West Palm Beach.

Manire

ExteNet, which is involved in commercial office space, healthcare, hospitality and sports/entertainment, is seeing the in-building wireless market evolve away from the carrier-funded model.

“There are some very interesting changes going on in the indoor market,” he said. With respect to venues there has been a significant change in terms of how wireless networks are funded and deployed.”

Because of downward pressure on revenues from users, the ability of the carriers to fund smaller venues has been limited, leading to sales efforts directed straight to the venue owner.

“Our pitch to the venue owner is they need to think about wireless coverage as another utility. It is that important. It’s like water or electricity, heat or air conditioning,” he said. “Your tenants want to have connectivity anytime and anywhere. Studies have shown that if you have wireless connectivity it enhances the value of the building.”

ExteNet chose HetNet Expo 2017 to announce a new indoor deployment at the Columbia Center, the tallest skyscraper in Seattle. The company owns and operates more than 350 outdoor and indoor distributed networks in the United States.

Separately, Katarina Kueber, general manager at Urban Renaissance Group, said, “Building tenants and visitors expect wireless service to work flawlessly inside, irrespective of the size of the building. Today, wireless infrastructure is deemed critical for enhanced business performance and operations, with building owners and managers risking loss of business without adequate investment in indoor wireless coverage. We are extremely glad to be working with a proven leader like ExteNet in our network design and build.”

Buildings, especially older buildings, are a key growth segment, according to Manire. Building owners need to enhance their communications infrastructure to support tenant services and building management systems, because the current wiring is far below acceptable.

“Sometimes the wiring in buildings looks like a bowl of spaghetti,” he said. “It is an area we think deserves a lot of attention, so we are starting to spend more resources looking at combining the building of our wireless network infrastructure and the broadband infrastructure to support tenant services and building management services.”

ExteNet’s “New Distributed Network Vision” focuses on hyper densification of the distributed network architecture, functionality at the edge and the Internet of Things. The future of wireless is going to be less about individual technologies and more about network architecture, according to Manire.

“The focus will be on how to build a robust architecture that will support the applications and IoT that we see coming down the line,” he said. “We think that distributed networks are going to be an increasingly critical component of the overall wireless topography and hyper densification [of small cells] is going to be a part of that. We see edge functionality, more intelligence being pushed to the edge, and more content being pushed to the edge to enhance services for users.”

Manire noted nodes will reach more than 111 thousand in 2017, according to iGR Research, and the number will reach more than 519 thousand by 2021. Extenet is already involved in hyper densification of small cells in Manhattan, where it has more than 2,000 small cell nodes supporting four carriers, with has rights to 8,000 poles. It is also busy hyper-densifying the nodes in San Francisco.