This week’s inauguration to put Nextel technology to the test.
Driving around the nation’s capital, it’s impossible to miss the extensive preparations underway for President Bush’s inauguration, which will be held at noon on Thursday in Washington, D.C.
A massive wooden platform has been erected on the front terrace of the U.S. Capitol for the swearing-in ceremony. Bleachers perch on the sidewalks along the 2-mile parade route. Barricades, temporary fences and police have blanketed the area between the White House and Capitol Hill.
Scattered across the National Mall and nearby streets are white vans and trailers topped by 40-foot poles, antennas and microwave dishes. These mobile cellular towers are loaded with racks of radios and other gear needed to support the needs of the 750,000 people expected to attend the inauguration.
Cellular carriers such as Nextel are spending millions of dollars and countless hours of engineering time to prepare its networks for four days of festivities.
For Nextel, the preparations involve doubling the capacity of its network in downtown Washington and adding redundant T-1 lines and back-up power generators. Nextel also built a special on-site war room for monitoring network performance.
“To prepare for events like this, you have to think big,” says Jihad Hermes, Nextel’s vice president for RF engineering and operations in the Northeast region. “It’s like building a city overnight.”
Nextel is a key provider of cellular service to local law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Secret Service; Metro D.C., Police; U.S. Park Police and the FBI. Nextel anticipates a big spike in the amount of walkie-talkie traffic, cell phone calls and e-mails being sent by law enforcement personnel as well as its regular business customers.
“On the day of the event, we will have dozens of people watching every bit and byte and pulse that comes out of our network,” Hermes says. “After the event, there will be analysis, presentations and celebrations.”
On an unseasonably warm afternoon a week before the inaugural festivities begin, Nextel demonstrates that most of its network deployment is done. Nextel’s engineering team oozes confidence as it prepares for this high-visibility event. That’s because handling big events such as the inauguration has become routine for it.
In the past year, Nextel has supported numerous events that attracted 100,000 or more people, including the G8 Summit, the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, the dedication of the National World War II Memorial and former President Ronald Reagan’s funeral.
Each time, Nextel has deployed a custom-tailored network in a matter of days, weeks or months and then torn it down afterward.
“We don’t panic so much anymore,” says Lalita Subramanian, a senior RF manager with Nextel. “We’ve gotten better and better at these events.”
Nextel’s engineering and operations group has had the inauguration on its radar for a year, but planning for this network began in earnest six months ago. About 50 of Nextel’s 600 engineering and operations staff in the Washington, D.C., area have helped get the company’s network ready for the festivities.
The 2005 inauguration is the largest event Nextel has supported in the mid-Atlantic. Nextel’s most-extensive support overall is at the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square. It’s also the event with the tightest security, placing unprecedented demands on Nextel for field engineers who are U.S. citizens with security clearances.
“It’s more sensitive because we have a sitting president involved,” Hermes says. “We have to allow for a lot of last-minute needs.”
For months, Nextel’s engineering and operations group has been planning the network capacity and coverage required for the inauguration. They met with law enforcement customers to understand their needs. They purchased and integrated new radios from Motorola, Nextel’s primary supplier. They negotiated with city officials, building owners and hotel managers about equipment location.
By mid-December, Nextel had most of its auxiliary network equipment in place. The carrier added more than 100 radios to the rooftops of buildings along the parade route and near the Capitol. A dozen nearby hotels and other key buildings such as MCI Center and the Washington Convention Center were equipped with wireless service to support attendees at the inaugural balls and other festivities.
Nextel also deployed seven mobile cellular towers – nicknamed COWs for cell on wheels – in the National Mall area. Each COW has 20 radios and can support up to 120 simultaneous calls.
By adding this much network capacity in such a concentrated area, Nextel is supporting the equivalent of a midsized city in the 1.5-mile radius surrounding the U.S. Capitol.
“What we would normally build to support a city of 2 million people, we have built in about 1 mile,” Hermes says. “It’s the intensity and localization of the demand that’s so challenging.”
Nextel has added the same amount of network capacity to downtown Washington in the last month that it normally would add to a city over three years.
Despite Nextel’s massive network-deployment effort, it’s hard for the untrained eye to pick out all the extra antennas and radios. The new wireless gear is so well disguised in the ceiling of one local hotel that Nextel’s own engineers had trouble finding their radios, which look like upside down Styrofoam cups cemented to the ceiling.
Like everything else about this inauguration – which will have an unprecedented security level – much of Nextel’s preparation is being done behind the scenes. That’s why Nextel can’t say precisely where its gear is located without getting in trouble.
“Dozens of our people will be working that day whether you see them or not,” Hermes says. “We have people assigned to certain areas that are cordoned off to the public.”
For the Nextel engineering team, politics hasn’t gotten in the way of their pride in having their network perform well on Thursday.
“It didn’t matter to us who won the election,” Subramanian says. “It could have been Ronald McDonald up there, and we would still have to get the job done.”
