Monday March 13th 2006, 2:38 pm
Filed under: Wireless Industry
Filed under: Wireless Industry
Comments?
We have had plans to put an AP in Glendo, Wyoming for about nine months now. Glendo is just a little town of about 300 people, but it is right next to a beautiful lake that is very popular as a second house location for superrich people. They have no Internet other than dialup, and their phone service pretty questionable whether it is on landlines or cell phone. A developer contacted us and offered to do just about anything to get us up into the area. Sounded simple, but got complicated in a hurry.
We made plans to deploy to Glendo in September of 2005. American Tower had a site that had visibility to two of our backbone sites. We started through the process of applying for colo space on the tower site. An acceptable monthly rate was negotiated and we waited for AmTower to get back to us…and waited…and waited. They finally came back the first week of November with a requirement for an expensive “structural engineering analysis”. Our antennas weigh about 25 pounds total and were going on a tower that was so big you could probably attach a semi to one face. There was also a requirement for only using their contractors at a pretty high rate. Combined with a monthly rate that was already pretty high, I started looking for alternative tower locations.
I contacted a railroad, pipeline company, paging company and cell phone company that all had towers in the same general area. The cell phone company sounded like they were ready to go and we made plans to deploy on their tower. The only issue that came up was that their contract was very late coming. On January 1, I met with their tower crew at the site to put our equipment on the tower. Turned out I didn’t have DB clamp brackets that were large enough to go around the legs, and they didn’t have the power issues worked out so we postponed the install. Good thing, because the contract came in two days later and had a $3500 installation charge and a monthly rate $130 higher than what we had originally discussed. Scratch that plan.
Out of desperation, I used Radiomobile to plot potential coverage areas from our Glendo AP site and our nearest backhaul point in Lingle, Wyoming. We found a couple of locations on a ranch near Wendover, Wyoming. I called my local contact and told him the situation, and he was on it. He found the landowner and arranged for a visit. I went to the ranch house and got a ride over a very steep, rocky trail to a beautiful hilltop with visibility for miles and miles. I fired up Netstumbler and verified that I could get a signal from Lingle and a clear path to Glendo - then left a six foot chunk of pipe at the site to mark the location.
We got all of the necessary arrangements made with the landowner and got our equipment organized. My local contact called me early last week and said he had everything ready to go on his end, including a post hole digger and some help and that I should be there on Saturday to get everything installed. I put together a “redneck monopole” - which was basically a 25 foot chunk of center pivot pipe with ladder pegs welded to the sides and a utility pole transformer mount welded to the top, got a used 24volt wind generator, four 6volt batteries, a 24v to 12v dc/dc converter and WRAP board with StarOS, 2 CM9 cards and 2 5ghz grid antennas for the repeater.
There was snow on the ground Thursday and Friday, and I didn’t think we would be able to do the project on Saturday. I called my contact, and he said it was a beautiful day and there wasn’t much snow at all, so come on up. I picked up my equipment and Shingai (our tech) and headed for Glendo. We were quite a sight, with about 12 feet of the pole and the wind generator sticking out the back of my pickup. We met the local guys and started up the steep path to the top of the hill.
Things got real interesting in a hurry. There wasn’t a lot of snow in town, but plenty of snow on the hills, so the path to to top of the hill was pretty slick. Think skiing trail - it was that steep. My contact was driving a skid steer loader and made it about 3/4 up the hill, then couldn’t get any further up. We hit a part of the trail that took three tries to get up, and nearly went over the side trying to get back down to get a good run. Fortunately, one of us made it to the top, then turned around and went back for a four wheel drive tractor. When he got back with the tractor, he pulled our pickup to the top - good thing because we would have never made it on our own, then went back and pulled the skid steer.
We made it! But when we started drilling holes for the pole, we found that we couldn’t get down more than about three feet through the rock on top, and we needed at least six feet to put in our big pole. After some quick evaluation, I decided to cement in the original pipe that I left to mark the site and then attach the wind generator pole to it and the antennas to the wind generator pole. Once we got the pole installed, the rest of the installation went pretty well. Other than being really cold. Shingai had to spend a fair amount of time in the truck with the heater on, as his Zimbabwe-adapted physique was not ready for the cold.
We fired up the site with a 24db 2.4Ghz grid going back to the Lingle AP site just to get it going (our 5ghz backhaul dish was still pointed to the cell phone site) and linked up with a -78 signal. Mission accomplished. We left the redneck monopole up on the hill, because the thought of going back down a slick, narrow trail with a 350 pound pole flying around the back wasn’t very appealing.
We have to make a second trip to the location to get our pole and replace the 2.4 antenna with a 5ghz dish and then we will be able to light up Glendo.
I don’t think anything that I did was particularly innovative or special, but I have to give a lot of credit to the locals that I have been working with. They have been ignored by every other telecom company in their need for high speed internet and decided to find someone to get the job done. Our main contact has put in HOURS of his own time to help us get going, and then took his Saturday afternoon to risk life and limb to run a skid steer loader up a snow covered mountain trail and freeze his butt off helping us get set up. It would have been easy to turn around and say forget it. We are never going to get a ton of customers from this branch of our network and the work to get it done is not going to have the same kind of payoff as other projects we have in the works. But I have a soft spot for people who just figure out a way to get it done and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty to help. From the sounds of it, the whole town was supporting and encouraging this guy to do anything to get high speed internet into the area, and I had a hard time thinking about not being able to deliver.
This episode is both a testament to the good things about America and an illustration of some of our policy failures. The existing telecom utilities have been able to take advantage of programs designed to deliver services to places like Glendo and turn them into telecom profits - while the people that the program is supposed to help are left out in the cold. Qwest can barely keep the phone lines running in the town, much less deliver any kind of advanced services. On the other hand, it is great to see people have the opportunity to come up with their own solution and figure out a way to get it done. If it will work on Mount Everest, it should work for Wyoming as well. :^)
In another two weeks, Glendo and Glendo Lake will have high speed Internet service. The Lake is going to have 5ghz service that will deliver up to 2meg to the homes and marina - and hopefully the owners of those homes will be able to spend a lot more time there now that they have Internet connectivity. Being a WISP isn’t just about the opportunity that we have for ourselves, it is also about the opportunity that we can provide to others who are getting ignored.