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Introduction to DAS
Introduction to DAS
Kreines & Kreines, Inc. has received inquires from Ohio, Michigan and Washington
State municipalities faced with DAS (Distributed Antenna Systems) applications.
The idea sounds great: antennas on streetlights! Revenue to the municipality!
But consider this: DAS means fiber optic cables strung in the rights-of-way
throughout the community. Are you ready to have your streets and roads dug up
(again)?
Call Kreines & Kreines, Inc. when you get a DAS application for what the
applicant calls a fiber optic network but which are actually personal wireless
services.
Hello! Your Local Government Must Approve This Application Within 60 Days
A small city in Ohio received an unsolicited application from a would-be
provider to install “RFoF” (Radiofrequency over Fiber) in their community. The
Village Attorney knew Kreines & Kreines, Inc. because he has hired us for
another small Village and he called us immediately. The applicant calls itself a
“carriers’ carrier,” but the service provided is really a brokerage.
What are Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS)?
RFoF is one company’s acronym for yet another buzz term: Distributed Antenna
Systems or DAS. DAS’s are like co-location towers; only, instead of providing
positions on a vertical mount, DAS spreads several carriers’ antennas throughout
the community. Instead of height, which a tower provides, DAS’s provide a fiber
optic transport mode between the antennas and a “hotel,” where equipment is
housed. The fiber optic link could be as distant as 20 miles from an antenna,
giving the community two distinct blessings:
• No towers necessary (for DAS, that is). But if the community already has
towers – or some other company wants to build them – DAS does nothing to change
business as usual.
• No equipment necessary (in your small community, maybe, but it’s got to go
somewhere).
What the RFoF brokers don’t elaborate on is that fiber optic cable will have to
be laid throughout a community’s rights-of-way. If your citizens like to have
their streets dug up, this technology is for you.
Here’s How DAS Works (Or Doesn’t Work, as the Case May Be)
RF signals are generated from equipment cabinets in distant “hotels” rather than
in shelters or on pads beneath a tower. The signals are sent in nanoseconds over
buried fiber optic lines to closely-spaced utility poles throughout the
community. A small “stick” or whip antenna at the top of the pole serves the
handsets or laptops in a very small area.
A handset sends a signal to the small antenna and the signal is sent back to the
hotel over the same fiber optic lines. A switching center near the hotel
converts the RF signal to the Local Exchange Carrier’s landline and the cell
phone call then reaches its intended recipient. If the call is going to an area
without towers, the call will have been a tower-free call, and that is where the
future of wireless is headed.
Billing for the call is more complicated than with towers. The DAS brokers get a
per-unit (e.g., seconds, minutes, bytes, etc.) fee for all calls placed. That
fee is reduced from what the carrier gets, but the carrier doesn’t have to pay
rent to a tower owner.
It’s Speculative, No Matter How You Look At It
If you’re an entrepreneur, the DAS game is high-risk, high reward. The
particular broker in the Midwest village is selling RFoF which means the broker
isn’t licensed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), but the broker
will do the heavy lifting for a personal wireless service carrier. So, on the
one hand, the DAS has no FCC spectrum to deploy wireless and can not be
considered a personal wireless service under the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
On the other hand, carriers hate the business of infrastructure deployment,
leaving it to tower builders.
Enter the broker: DAS will provide the infrastructure deployment and the carrier
can be in the hotel at one end and have its market served at the other end.
There remains a small problem: how to get those expensive fiber optic lines
built.
Telecommunications Act 101
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was quite deferential to landline companies.
Those companies wanted to be Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs) and
Independent Local Exchange Carriers (ILECs) as well as cable companies and just
plain broadband transport carriers. “The more the merrier” says the
Telecommunications Act, particularly with Section 253(a), which states:
Removal of Barriers to Entry.
(a) IN GENERAL. – No State or local statute or regulation, or other State or
local requirement, may prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting the ability of
any entity to provide any interstate of intrastate telecommunications service.
On the basis of this seeming exemption from local planning and zoning, the
“RFoF” broker in the Midwest is claiming that the small Village cannot stop the
broker from digging up all the roads and streets in town in order to carry RF
signals, particularly “2.5G (PCS, Cellular and ESMR), 3G (nobody yet, but all
the 2.5G carriers someday soon) and Wi-Fi (802.11b).” The only problem for the
RFoF broker is these carriers are personal wireless services and Kreines &
Kreines, Inc. believes that Section 704 of Telecommunications Act overrides
Section 253(a).
So the RFoF broker could theoretically tear up the streets, install conduit and
pull fiber through the conduit everywhere in the Village. But, when it comes
time to approve those little “stick” antennas on the utility poles, the Village
can exercise its zoning authority over personal wireless service facilities to
approve or deny each antenna. The RFoF broker may be taking quite a financial
risk, unless the municipality relinquished planning and zoning authority by
signing a “right-of-way agreement.”
About the 60 Day Deadline
And that’s what the RFoF broker wants: a signed right-of-way management
agreement right now. In the case of our small municipality, which has no
personal wireless service facility ordinance,
Kreines & Kreines, Inc. has a lot of work to do in 60 days.
The demand for an approval to operate in the right-of-way may have to be
fulfilled within 60 days in this particular Midwestern Village. But a
municipality can protect itself from suffering dug up rights-of-way by having:
• A Wireless Master Plan with areas in the right-of-way that are acceptable for
personal wireless service facilities and areas that are not acceptable for
personal wireless service facilities.
• Personal wireless service facility zoning (not a “tower ordinance”) that
permits DAS’s meeting the standards in the zoning ordinance.
• A Cost Recovery and Revenue Generation Manual that allows the municipality to
recover the money it spent for consultants to prepare these types of documents,
for its staff to review applications and even make money for its own general
fund.
With these types of documents, it makes no sense for the RFoF broker to tear up
streets and spend millions of dollars because each personal wireless service
facility “stick” can still be denied.
The following are two examples from applications for streetlight mounts received by
PlanWireless readers confronted with DAS applications.
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