The recent Connect(X) conference provided a broad forum to discuss current trends and outlook for the wireless infrastructure business from many perspectives. I had the privilege of moderating a panel titled ‘The Neutral Host Opportunity’ with participation from Paul Reddick, SVP-Corporate, Business and Product Development with Crown Castle, Sean Shanini, CEO of Inorsa Wireless, and Greg Najjar, Director-Sales, DAS and Small Cells at SBA Communications.
The term neutral host has different meanings depending on the application. Basically, neutral hosts provide a valuable link between wireless service providers and enterprises and end user organizations. The neutral host, as a business and technical model, applies mainly to indoor and outdoor distributed antenna systems (DAS) and small cells, but that model is evolving.
Neutral Host Scenarios
Both Crown Castle and SBA offer neutral host indoor and outdoor DAS and small cells. A DAS rebroadcasts wireless carrier-owned frequencies inside buildings and venues. From a tower company perspective, it’s all shared infrastructure. Najjar explained that identifying the suitable property for a neutral host involves the carriers first specifying where they need new coverage and capacity, or an upgrade, for a particular geographic area or vertical market such as hospitality or healthcare. Tower company real estate managers then meet with landlords and building owners in the area to explain how a neutral host will improve wireless service inside their buildings. Once agreements are reached, the neutral host system is designed and built. The towercos own and operate the DAS for the building owners.
Besides DAS and small cells, CBRS and Open-RAN are coming into the neutral host vernacular. With CBRS neutral hosts, cellular signals stay outside; only CBRS frequencies are broadcast inside the building. Reddick says, “we’re already deploying some networks that are neutral hosts so that multiple carriers can run on it.” CBRS adds to Crown’s neutral host toolkit. He says, “even when we’re looking at the same building, it’s far less expensive for us to provide a neutral host on CBRS,” admitting that it’s different from a classical DAS installation. “It’s a cost trade-off. We think that at that lower cost, though, you can penetrate more and more buildings.” CBRS also creates opportunities to run private networks as a neutral host model.
Najjar expects that as the CBRS planning and deployment process becomes less complicated, then the industry will see faster adoption of neutral host schemes. Similarly, the panel saw O-RAN, though in its formative stages, as an important development because it starts to uncouple network elements and those uncoupled elements can be shared.
Challenges
Site data accuracy is one of the biggest challenges in planning, deploying, and maintaining neutral host installations. Shahini pointed out that automation and artificial intelligence streamline the engineering and design process to achieve data accuracy. Building drawings and design documents are the primary data sources but can be voluminous and often out of date. “Ultimately, the more accurate the site data, the more efficient and cost-effective the construction and maintenance,” says Shahini. “Over time, with better data, system maintenance and upgrades become more predictable and can be optimized for timing and cost.”
Outlook
The panelists agreed that “relentless mobile data demand” is driving the need for neutral host deployments across multiple fronts. Carriers in larger markets see capacity almost doubling every year. Moreover, sunsetting older wireless technologies will also drive network upgrades and densification.
In-building commercial and public safety DAS and small cell deployments will be the neutral host mainstays but will evolve. CBRS and O-RAN offer a lot of potential to expand the shared infrastructure model, especially in private networks. The panel supported the idea that applying some of those shared infrastructure models even further indoors will be very important along with edge computing needed to run those networks.
The panel was unanimous, though, that making such solutions work involves a close working partnership among the wireless carriers, tower companies, suppliers, and systems integrators.
By John Celentano, Inside Towers Business Editor
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