Telecoms look to overcome passive problems at 5G conference

OTTAWA — Conflicting municipal 5G policies. Bureaucratic exhaustion from telecom companies’ next generation deployment sales pitches. ‘Backlash’ against carriers from tearing up city streets. Telecom companies face a range of challenges from some Canadian municipalities at a tense time when it comes to 5G deployment, members of a panel looking at a range of topics surrounding small cell deployment told an audience Wednesday at the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association’s (CWTA) third annual 5G conference in Ottawa. Rogers Communications Inc.’s director of municipal and industry relations, Michael Piaskoski, said those issues are “more the exception than the norm” but they are “still problematic” and could multiply with next generation infrastructure. One of those challenges has been dealing with some cities that have inconsistent views or policies from department to department over how they plan to treat 5G deployment. “We are facing different, conflicting views or policies within municipalities,” he said. Their IT departments might say they want to be smart cities, but then their engineering departments might say something like: “hold on, we just paved the streets downtown, we’re not tearing them up again,” he said. Song Nhi Nguyen, an enterprise architect for infrastructure and security at the City of Montreal, told Wednesday’s audience Montreal is eager to become a top tier smart city. But some aspects of upgrading networks, like ensuring consistent service for public safety communications, prompt serious concerns among bureaucrats. “We need to have consistency for the service,” he said. “You cannot put a price on that. We need to be there and talk about that.” He said there are issues yet to be solved when it comes to deploying antennas on passive infrastructure: lamp posts weren’t designed to host telecom antenna structures, and will only be able to handle a few each. “If we do first-come first-serve...after that, what do we tell everyone? Then it’s not fair. We need to put something to allow sharing.” While there was a sense from everyone on the panel that there won’t be major hurdles if all stakeholders collaborate and cooperate, telecom companies are looking to deploy thousands of 5G small cell devices in cities in non-traditional locations -- from lamp posts to bus shelters and other ‘street furniture’ -- which creates new challenges, a new deployment environment, and makes outlier cases more difficult to deal with. That notably comes after a decade of increased telecom construction where equipment has filled up streets, which at times has “annoyed” cities, and a roughly two-year period of “backlash” from certain municipalities upset with how their streets have been torn up, Piaskoski told the audience. “We’re starting to see, it’s happened over the last two years, a backlash against carriers…we were seeing street bylaws or construction standards making it very difficult to deploy.” And when companies put up a large tower, they have to send out notifications to nearby residents, do consultations, have town hall meetings, and seek the approval of council -- lots of steps that sometimes result in lengthy delays or even court challenges. “That’s not going to work if we’re doing small cells,” Piaskoski said. “We can’t be talking to every household within a 50m or 100m radius of a street light and say ‘are you OK with this little antenna’?” “So we are going to need to see some regulations or just relaxation of some of the things we’re facing,” he added. Telecom companies have been pressing the federal government in a major consultation about the future of Canada’s communications laws to hand the final jurisdiction in arbitrating ‘passive infrastructure’ disputes over to the CRTC, foreseeing potentially costly problem cases -- a move that’s garnered opposition from utilities. Carriers have also been looking for changes to consultative steps for small cells. Telus Corp.’s submission to the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review panel contains a number of suggestions to revamp site approval process for small cells, warning of “unnecessarily delayed” deployment and “undue extraordinary costs.” One of those suggestions was to look to what the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S. has done in setting new rules for small cell deployment, including introducing “shot clocks for small wireless facilities” for processing applications. Bryan Tramont, managing partner at WBK Law, told Wednesday’s audience there a few areas where Canada can learn from the U.S. already, such as “trying to right-size the regulations to fit the infrastructure” which weren’t designed for smaller cells. He also noted that in March last year, the FCC streamlined a category of small cells to cut down on review times. “In a lot of cases, this infrastructure is no more intrusive than putting up a basketball net in your backyard,” he said. There was, however, notably no mention of Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. Wednesday, the proverbial elephant in the room at the conference. Huawei has been at the centre of an intense political push led by the U.S. to ban the company’s infrastructure equipment from Canada and other countries’ 5G networks. — With reporting by Kyle Duggan at kduggan@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Telecoms look to overcome passive problems at 5G conference

News | January 24, 2019

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Telecoms look to overcome passive problems at 5G conference

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