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Gaining access to the Mirage/SpectraSite equipment room requires that you go through an employee entrance at the back of the building. Experiencing the world beyond the casino floor is both exciting and a little disillusioning: Behind the wizard's curtain, the Mirage is no different from any other hotel - industrial-sized laundry carts sit in the hallway, piled high with dirty bed sheets and foul-smelling bath towels, while in a nearby room off-duty bellmen sit playing cards at a small folding table. But for casino habitues, there are also minor revelations - for example, getting an eyeful of the plastic pipelines that pump endless gallons of liquor to the Mirage's many bars and restaurants.
The equipment room itself is located directly above the Mirage's gaming floor - navigate across the catwalk erected amidst the labyrinthine expanse of beams, pipes and wires that make up an unfinished section of this vast mezzanine level and you can hear from below the dull plink of slot machine payoffs and the disembodied voices of casino employees calling out Keno numbers.
Behind one of the mezzanine's doors is the 1200-square-foot room that houses SpectraSite's network equipment - about 75,000 pounds worth in all. Simply getting this much gear inside the Mirage required SpectraSite to lease a 40-ton crane that lifted the equipment piece by piece from ground level, a process that took place exclusively in the wee hours of the morning to minimize its impact on casino business.
SpectraSite first started discussing the project with MGM Mirage in mid-2001; the two companies finalized the deal over Christmastime, and the system went live in March 2002. The Mirage was selected as the central hub site simply because it offered the available space that SpectraSite and its carrier partners required to get the system up and running.
"All of the carrier base stations and all of our base equipment is on the mezzanine level of the Mirage," Carey said. "Basically, we brought all the carriers, our main switching gear, the battery backups and the backup power together in one room, then distributed the RF throughout the other remaining casinos."
According to Rich Stern, SpectraSite's vice president and general manager of building solutions, the biggest obstacle was convincing the five mobile operators on the MGM Mirage network (Verizon Wireless, Cingular Wireless, AT&T Wireless, Sprint and Nextel) to play nice. "The challenge was getting all the carriers to agree on sharing space [in the Mirage equipment room]," Stern said. "We had to persuade them to play in the same sandbox."
SpectraSite must also develop solutions that conform to the whims and demands of its landlord partners. "Negotiating with a very sophisticated entity such as MGM Mirage was a challenge," Carey admitted. "When MGM rolled up all those casinos, there was still a CEO and CFO in each individual casino, so we had to fight through their politics internally as well as trying to figure the technology out. One major challenge was integrating the technology with the existing aesthetics and infrastructure. But go to the Bellagio and I defy you to find where the antenna placements are - they fit in with the decor and color perfectly."
Despite their demands, SpectraSite's casino partners seem very pleased to offer wireless services to their guests. "People would get frustrated when they couldn't use their phones in public areas like the lobby or a meeting room, and a lot of people were going outside to make calls," said Kurt Ohlson, executive director of hotel operations for Atlantic City's Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort, another SpectraSite partner. "Now people can use their phones anywhere, and we don't hear complaints and we don't see people going out onto the Boardwalk. That means they can tend to business in the casino, which is playing - because when they walk out onto Boardwalk, they may walk to another property."
SpectraSite has also deployed its solution in shopping centers across the U.S., enjoying exclusive access to more than 200 malls owned by real estate ownership, development and management firm Simon Property Group. So far SpectraSite has wired 24 Simon malls, including the Forum Shops that connect to yet another Las Vegas casino, Caesars Palace, and plans to complete another 12 shopping centers by the end of the year.
"It was a terrible problem - we couldn't get coverage, either because it was a capacity issue or, more likely, because the design did not allow for the permeation of the signal inside of the shopping centers," said Marty Plocica, Simon's senior vice president of business development. "We thought shoppers were spending less time in our malls as a result."
And that's bad not just for Simon, but also for mall retailers - a growing number of which are wireless carriers themselves. Plocica called wireless retail a "very hot category," one for which poor coverage was a particularly problematic issue: "After all, it's very hard to sell a product you can't demonstrate."
For wireless carriers, SpectraSite is the answer to any number of problems. "You want to provide coverage to malls and casinos, but the time frame in getting a site built and on-air is just not consistent with customer demands," said Chris Hillabrandt, regional vice president of engineering and operations for T-Mobile USA, a tenant of many SpectraSite properties. "This is a continuing issue for carriers. A vast portion of our sales go on in retail locations, and in addition, our business subscribers have expectations that have risen in terms of quality of coverage and capacity requirements, particularly with the proliferation of data. All those issues drove a rising need to find an in-building solution that would be more timely to market."
Hillabrandt said that while T-Mobile knew that partnering with SpectraSite would immediately yield a better customer experience, improved in-building services have also generated a steady rise in the volume of user traffic in tough-to-reach sites.
"From a cost-effectiveness standpoint, carriers always preferred outdoor, macro-type coverage - however, in areas where we're challenged from a zoning perspective, these kinds of solutions are a real boon to serving customers," Hillabrandt said. "It's been a great relationship, and we're very happy with the results."
Since wrapping up the MGM Mirage build, SpectraSite has wired some 60 casinos and malls across the U.S. "The in-building space was highly entrepreneurial - it was very much a start-up, and we've learned a lot along the way," Carey said. "We clearly needed our carrier, real estate and technology expertise. We needed voices that could speak the carrier speak, voices that could speak the real estate speak and voices that could speak the technology speak."
According to Carey, another of SpectraSite's strengths is that the company is technology-agnostic. "We look at each property as a stand-alone opportunity, and tailor the technology we think best suits that venue. Folks who manufacture their own gear and are also in the neutral host space - or someone who is simply a gear manufacturer - are tied to one particular technology. We're not. We own the network, we run the network, but the reality is we're building a castle in someone else's sandbox. We don't own the sand, it's not our sandbox, but we're in there trying to build something. That has a lot of inherent difficulties, and a lot of different constituencies. You have to see all the different vantage points and coordinate a win-win for everyone involved."
Beyond the casino and mall verticals, SpectraSite is also targeting large public sites like airports, convention centers and campus-like environments, including universities and large corporate and medical complexes. "I think you'll see in-building coverage in virtually all those kinds of public buildings over the next few years," Clark said. "What it all leads to ultimately when the costs come down is all the multi-tenant buildings. The capacity needs per square foot are by far greatest in the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the United States - carriers would be very excited about a multi-tenant office building solution at the right cost, which no one in the industry is able to deliver today. But there's still a lot of work going on with software-defined radios and other techniques that might bring that cost down."
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From Carey's perspective, the doors are just beginning to open. "We feel very strongly that the distribution of RF is the wave of the future," Carey said. "We're such an urban-focused company - 71% of our towers are in top-100 markets. Couple that with our in-building focus, which is taking the antenna even closer to the subscriber and getting it right inside a self-contained property. The further extension is taking the antenna into neighborhoods, high-density urban markets and downtown corridors. The distribution of RF is a place that we want to participate in. And we're uniquely positioned to do that."
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