Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Nextel's Vito Centofanti Says- "It's extremely hard to pinpoint dead spots for correction"

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 03:27:56 -0500

Nextel's Vito Centofanti Says-
"It's extremely hard to pinpoint dead spots for correction"
Can you hear me now? How 'bout now?
Steve Alexander, Star Tribune

Published February 22, 2004
CELL22

When Alisa Lowry
moved to a new house
in Coon Rapids, her
wireless phone service
stayed behind.

Without knowing it, she
had moved to a "dead
spot" -- one of dozens
of black holes in Twin
Cities wireless phone
networks where service
fails for any number of
reasons.

Finding that wireless phones don't work everywhere, as implied in TV
advertisements, sometimes can be a rude surprise for customers.

"I was disappointed to find out there is not coverage everywhere," said
Lowry, 28, a high school teacher. "They should tell you, when you first
start
up service, that it may not work."

Dead zones are a chronic problem for wireless companies as they jockey
for
customers -- and try to make land-line phones an anachronism.

Last week, wireless industry giant Verizon Wireless fell from No. 1 in
terms
of subscribers to No. 2 after the current No. 2 provider, Cingular
Wireless,
said it would buy No. 3 AT&T Wireless. The deal is expected to prompt a
wave of new deals for consumers as companies try to steal customers from

the merging companies.

But the real winner might be the company that can conquer the service
problems that are endemic to cell phones -- such as dead zones.

When cell phones were first gaining in popularity, such problems used to
be
accepted as part of the trade-off for the convenience of portability.
But now
that the number of customers has grown to 155 million nationwide,
consumers
have higher expectations.

"There are more and more wireless users, and they have expectations that

they can use their wireless phones everywhere," said Scott Grosz,
regional
executive director of the Verizon Wireless network, based in Plymouth.
"They
feel that way because wireless is becoming more and more their main form
of
communication."

A 2003 survey by industry research firm J.D. Power and Associates found
that wireless customers rank "call performance and reliability" as more
important than monthly cost or customer service. Verizon Wireless said a

survey of its customers showed that network quality was twice as
important
to them as customer service.

Persistent dead spots

Dead spots persist for a number of reasons: The cost to fix the problems
is
high and wireless networks are constantly changing because of increased
use,
interference from new buildings and the construction of cellular antenna

towers. "It's extremely hard to pinpoint dead spots for correction,"
said Vito
Centofanti, Nextel's Minnesota district manager in Bloomington. "When
you
retune the network to try to cover a dead spot, you may create another
one."

Or you might find another one. When Lowry's wireless phone wouldn't work

at home, Sprint PCS gave her a new phone that worked in her house. The
problem was that she quickly discovered that the new phone wouldn't work
in
her office on the lower level of Fridley High School, where she is a
physical
education teacher. What makes the new dead spot even more irritating to
Lowry is that one of her students can make calls from her office using a

different wireless service.

Twin Cities commuters, who have formed the habit of talking while they
drive,
are aware of dead spots whose locations vary, depending on which
wireless
service they're using.

Chris Pocta of Champlin, an AT&T Wireless customer who commutes to
work at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, regularly loses
calls on
a westbound entrance ramp to Hwy. 610 in Brooklyn Park.

"Sometimes the network will drop my call there, and sometimes I just
can't
hear the other person and they can't hear me," Pocta said. "I just make
sure
not to call anybody from there."

Said Verizon Wireless customer Breanna Dwyer of Minneapolis: "I expected

better reception when I was 16 and got my first phone." She knows she'll

enter a dead spot on Interstate Hwy. 35W at University Avenue in
Minneapolis. "Now that I'm 21, I've learned that the reception on cell
phones
isn't quality to begin with."

What causes them

Dead spots typically result because of performance problems in a "cell
site,"
the area covered by a single set of wireless antennas that communicate
with a
cell phone. In cities, these cell sites usually serve an area 2 to 5
miles in
diameter, so that a patchwork of cell sites is needed to cover the
entire Twin
Cities. When a customer drives, the signal is automatically handed off
from
one site to the next so that a phone call isn't lost. Several factors
can cause
dead spots between cell sites. Among the reasons:

• Sometimes the areas served by adjacent cell sites don't overlap,
leaving
small dead spots in between. This might happen because the wireless
company made a mistake or because local zoning laws prevented the
wireless
firm from putting up an antenna where one was needed.

• When some types of cell sites are heavily used, their coverage area
actually
contracts, a phenomenon called "cell breathing." This contraction can
create
dead spots along the edges of the area previously covered by the cell.

• Obstacles -- man-made and natural -- can create dead spots by blocking

cell phone radio signals. The construction of an office building can
force
wireless companies to add antennas just to maintain the coverage area
that
existed. The seasons also can make a difference: A cell site that
provides
good coverage in the winter, when trees have lost leaves, might develop
dead
spots in the spring when the leaves grow back and block radio signals.

• The recession might have made the problem of dead spots worse. Tough
times forced wireless companies to cut back on capital spending for new
equipment at a time when the number of wireless customers was increasing

rapidly, said Albert Lin, a telecommunications analyst at American
Technology Research Inc., a research firm in San Francisco.

That problem eased in the second half of last year, when the largest
carriers
increased capital spending about 50 percent to catch up with problems
such
as dead spots, and to prepare for "wireless number portability," a
federal
requirement that consumers be able to transfer from one company to
another
while keeping the same phone number, he said.

"It finally reached a point where the wireless companies felt it would
damage
their business if they did not upgrade their existing networks," Lin
said.

• Wireless network improvements have been slowed by the expense of
putting up a cell site, about $200,000, and the time to obtain the
necessary
legal permissions to build one, which can be as long as 18 months, Lin
said.
Costs and timetables can be reduced if an antenna can be added to an
existing cell tower operated by another company.

Caught between customer expectations of service quality and the
difficulty of
stamping out dead spots, the wireless service providers say they can
only
keep at it.

"We can't get rid of all the dead spots," Grosz said. "What we can do is

identify those areas and prioritize them for network build-out."
http://www.startribune.com/stories/462/4622082.html

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