After years of encouraging enterprises to invest in their own connectivity solutions, the wireless industry may have finally hit upon a winning formula. Instead of distributed antenna systems (DAS), some neutral host vendors are selling enterprise customers on multi-operator core networks (MOCN). MOCN is a shared core that connects to the base stations of every operator that wants to be part of the in-building network. Those base stations don’t need to be at the venue, which can make MOCN an easier option for carriers than a DAS.
“No physical gear needs to be deployed by us,” said AT&T’s JR Wilson, VP of Tower Strategy and Roaming. “With MOCN they point the system back to AT&T’s core, so it gets integrated into our core and just looks like another radio site.” Before the network traffic goes to AT&T’s core, it goes to the multi-operator core network.
Wilson said AT&T is participating in several MOCN trials. Along with T-Mobile, AT&T is currently part of a MOCN test bed using Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) at Chicago’s Millennium Parking Garage, a 9,000-space underground facility made of impermeable materials and covering almost 4 million square feet. The system supported visitors to the garage during the Democratic National Convention and Lollapalooza, with users getting average download speeds of 40 Mbps.
Dense Air Networks is the company that brought the MOCN solution to Millennium. “Twenty-eight business days after the contract was signed, the network was on the air,” said Dense Air COO James Wise. “I have every expectation that at some point we are going to build out that whole garage for them.”
Dense Air’s testbed includes ten Airspan radios deployed over roughly 200,000 square feet, Wise said. Millennium Parking Garages supplied fiber backbone, a gigabit enterprise network circuit, and two on-premise micro server rooms with rack space. Dense Air ran fiber to the radios and overlaid a cloud server for centralized management. “Our cellShare platform is in a data center in Chicago; that’s where the neutral host is,” explained Wise. “It backhauls out to the site, runs through a firewall into a grand master switch with GNSS timing and from there out, it is just cabling and switching.”
Users of the AT&T and T-Mobile networks transition to the neutral host when they enter the parking garage. So far, Dense Air and Millenium see the small cell network performing well, even during peak traffic times. The network has also enabled Millennium to understand signal and frequency behavior in the garage, and make plans to meet its connectivity needs at scale. “We have been able to do more faster with Dense Air than we have previously been able to achieve,” said Jamie Ponce, former Chief Innovation and Strategy officer at Millennium Parking Garage.
Ponce said there are many reasons connectivity is important to Millennium, including customer and staff safety, efficiency of parking and payment, digital signage, and collecting payments from EV chargers. Millennium is the largest public EV charging hub in the Midwest, Ponce said. “They need wired or wireless connectivity to be able to transact, share data, lock and unlock chargers, monitor sessions and do financial transactions,” he said. In the past, cabling was Millennium’s only option, but now the garage can connect Cradlepoint CBRS adapters to the EV chargers instead of running cable to each one of them. “I have scoured the country for a band 48 EV charger,” said Ponce. For now, he said “band 48 capable repeaters or routers” are the way to go.
Millennium Parking Garage still hasn’t announced a final decision on what solution it will use to connect the entire garage, but Ponce noted that a traditional DAS could be “expensive, invasive and labor intensive, and to cover such a large space could be prohibitive.”
One thing DAS and MOCN have in common is that carriers need to make a commitment to connect. The highest profile MOCN deployment to date was accomplished by Meta, which deployed the technology at a number of its corporate campuses. Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile all connected to Meta’s MOCN network. So far, AT&T and T-Mobile have been more involved in smaller MOCN trials than Verizon has.
This article represents the opinions of veteran telecom industry editor and journalist Martha DeGrasse, an Inside Towers Contributing Analyst with features appearing monthly. DeGrasse owns Network Builder Reports and contributes regularly to several publications. She was formerly a writer and editor with RCR Wireless and a TV business news producer.
By Martha DeGrasse Inside Towers Contributing Analyst
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