Speakers at a NEDAS DC panel on Thursday agreed there’s a lot of opportunity for telecoms as front haul networks move closer towards the user.
During panel titled: ”Where Fiber Meets The Tower,” in Washington, D.C., AiNET Senior Account Executive Ken Luzzatto said the “tower” can now be a light pole, building sides or street furniture, in addition to a traditional tower. FiberLight CEO Don MacNeil agreed.
ZenFi Networks Co-Founder and CEO Ray LaChance said his company is building 6K nodes in New York City. Out of 3,300 intersections, his company’s nodes will cover 2,600 of those, said LaChance. “The old networks were not built to support ultra-dense networks. I think fronthaul is where it’s at!” he exclaimed.
Asked what 5G means to fiber, Corning Optical Networks VP Network Architecture Bill Cune said, “Densification requires a lot of fiber. Front haul speed could be hundreds of gigs per second,” which is driving the use of fiber architecture, “all the way to the edge.”
Unlike years ago, when some network infrastructure was considered “rip and replace,” now, “you want infrastructure that can adapt and have a 10-to 20-year life cycle,” said Cune. “You want to get fiber and power as deep” into a building, “as you can,” he added.
As the day wound up, NATE Director of Legislative & Regulatory Affairs Jim Goldwater spoke on behalf of the Tower Family Foundation. NEDAS selected the foundation as its charity for 2019. Goldwater thanked the organization for the donation, and said in the approximately five years since it was formed, the organization has distributed about $800,000 to tower worker’s families; that includes over $265,000 this year.
NEDAS comes to the nation’s capital bi-annually. NEDAS President Ilissa Miller tells Inside Towers attendance was about 160 and is going up.
By Leslie Stimson, Inside Towers Washington Bureau Chief
November 22, 2019
Reader Interactions