Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Bryan (VZ), Jeff (RCC), Liang (Nexthell), Lenny (Nexthell) On Nexthell Interference.

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 13:18:27 -0400

Cell-Tower Detectives Fight Static
Anne Arundel Cuts Interference After Radio Frequency Swaps

By Yuki Noguchi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page E01

It was almost 11 p.m., and Jay Cuccia stood in the nearly empty parking
lot of the Marley Station mall in Glen Burnie, waving a walkie-talkie in
the air.

Police officers and firefighters depend on the brick-size device for
emergency communications, but at this spot in the shadow of two nearby
cell phone towers, its signal was overwhelmed. A woman's voice hiccupped
and buzzed with static. Cuccia made a quarter turn. No better. He
stepped back a few paces and gripped the antenna. A marginal
improvement. Half a dozen engineers from three cell-phone companies
watched as Cuccia, Anne Arundel County's communications officer,
tinkered.
About once a month, Cuccia and his team assemble late at night for a
"can-you-hear-me-now?" session to troubleshoot walkie-talkie problems.
They are on the front lines of the national conflict between public
safety communications systems and ever-increasing mobile phone traffic.
The stubborn problems in the mall parking lot show that solutions won't
come easily.
Some of the interference occurs when cell-phone signals combine and
overpower the weaker signals of public safety radios. But most of the
problems stem from the phone traffic of Reston-based Nextel
Communications Inc., which uses frequencies sandwiched in slivers
between those used by public safety agencies.

Nextel and its competitors are feuding over rival proposals before the
Federal Communications Commission to rearrange frequencies to separate
Nextel from the emergency communications systems. With billions of
dollars in costs and airwave rights at stake, platoons of lawyers and
lobbyists are working the issue in Washington.

Anne Arundel County already has moved ahead with part of Nextel's
broader plan. Engineers from the county, Nextel and its
rival carriers last year devised their own solution: The county arranged
a deal to swap frequencies with Nextel for less-congested ones, and
everyone involved pledged to fix any remaining problems.

"We've basically become a test laboratory for this problem," Cuccia
said. Since it switched to its new frequencies in January,
the number of problem spots have decreased more than 90 percent, he
said. "It's working, but at significant taxpayer expense."
Even after a $35 million upgrade of its emergency communications system,
the county has spent more than $200,000 fixing
remaining problems, which eat up a third of Cuccia's time.

Police and fire officers in Anne Arundel County first noticed
communication dead spots in late 1998. Cuccia's department
started getting calls complaining that signals from the radios would
fade or stop.

"They started learning where the problems were," Cuccia said. Police in
patrol cars would pull over errant drivers only where
they knew they could get a signal to dispatchers if they needed backup.

In early 1999, a serious car accident near Marley Station served as a
wake-up call. Emergency workers sent to the scene
couldn't communicate with the 911 dispatch center.

"It's the explosion of the cellular technology," said Jeffrey Martin,
the county's technical consultant. "Everyone has to have a cell
phone," he said, so the cellular companies kept building towers to carry
more traffic.

In 2000, the county began upgrading its emergency communications system.
The county plotted the 170 cell-phone towers in
the county on a map and developed software to predict where emergency
radios might be overpowered. Cuccia and Martin
drove around in the county's beat-up Ford Club Wagon testing along the
roads.

Much of the testing is done at night, when relatively few people are
making cell-phone calls, so cell-phone company engineers
can unplug some of their towers, then bring them up again slowly to
figure out which carrier's signal is causing interference.
Sometimes the police pull Cuccia over because the van he now uses,
bristling with antennas, looks suspicious cruising slowly
through a neighborhood at night.

Of 61 trouble spots originally identified by the county, at least 50
were caused by Nextel's signal, said Liang Li, the engineer
from Nextel who usually accompanied Cuccia and engineers from Cingular
Wireless and Verizon Wireless on the fix-it outings.
"We recognized that we had to do much more to mitigate interference," Li
said. In some cases, Nextel reduced its power to
one-fifteenth normal levels, risking dropped calls on its own network to
preserve the public safety signal, he said.
Disentangling Anne Arundel County's frequencies from those close to
Nextel has reduced the problem to a half-dozen bad
sites. Marley Station remains among them.
"It's still better," Martin said.

Now, the night meetings take place less often, as Cuccia and his team
keep working on lingering problems and on new ones
created by new cell towers.

During a recent meeting in a parking lot near the Capitol Raceway, just
north of Crofton, Len Cascioli, a Nextel engineer,
stared at his cell phone and waited for word that his carrier's signal
had been turned off to test for interference.

"This is the life of a tester," he said with resignation after midnight.
The engineers had been waiting for half an hour, turning on
and off their signals to test the walkie-talkie.

Nearby, Bryan Dorbert, Verizon Wireless's engineer, ran back to his car
and pulled out a portable spectrum analyzer to see
which carrier's signal was still up.

"You guys are spoiled," Cascioli said of Dorbert's fancy equipment.

Meanwhile, Cuccia walked in circles listening to the sounds from his
walkie-talkie. The culprits at that location, he said,
appeared to be Nextel and Cingular. When their signals are at full
power, the voice at the other end sounds like it's coming
through a pillow, or it cuts out entirely.

Sometimes, Cuccia said, the routine wears thin. "I've spent many
sleepless nights."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47852-2004Jun16.html

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