Atlanta, Georgia
Atlanta is the capital city of the Southeast, a city of the future with strong ties to its past. In the last two decades, Atlanta has experienced unprecedented growth -- the official city population remains steady at approximately 420,000, but the metro population has grown in the past decade by nearly 40 percent, from 2.9 million to 4.1 million people. A good measure of this growth is the ever-changing downtown skyline, along with skyscrapers constructed in the midtown, Buckhead, and perimeter business districts.
Facts
- Atlanta area covers more than 6,000 sq. miles
- Home to more than 4.1 million people
- Population growth of nearly 40 percent in 10 years
- 65 percent of the population under 35 years old
- 90 percent housing occupancy
- Nearly 20 million annual visitors
- More than 950 shopping centers
Challenges
Atlanta's population growth spawned the demand for increased wireless telecommunications systems for its mobile workers, local residents and visitors. Although Atlanta had numerous wireless service providers, multiple networks, and a plethora of towers, cellular deployments did not provide adequate coverage or capacity to meet the demand. Cellular users often experienced inconsistent performance from their wireless service.
- Large, diverse, mobile population
- Increasing demand for cellular usage
- Inconsistent wireless performance city-wide
- Limited budgets
- Cellular infrastructure out of capacity
- Citizens concerned about environmental issues regarding cell towers
NextG Solution
The City of Atlanta is meeting its wireless challenges by enabling an innovative wireless network from NextG Networks. This cost-effective, RF-over-fiber transport system significantly improves wireless coverage within capacity-constrained urban and isolated suburban areas.
Additionally, NextG Networks' scalable, DAS architecture enables cities to reduce the proliferation of traditional wireless infrastructure. Instead of erecting additional cellular towers and wireless rooftop sites, service providers can migrate toward small, unobtrusive antennas that are placed on existing utility poles, street signs, and other discrete locations in the public right-of-way.
Such antennas from NextG Networks are connected via fiber to base station equipment at remote locations, thus providing a distributed architecture with failover protection. Fiber-fed distributed antenna nodes improve cellular wireless coverage and can add the capability to effectively implement public safety services.
NextG Networks is a carrier's carrier that designs, permits, builds, operates, and manages DAS systems in the City of Atlanta. As such, NextG uses the City's streetlight poles, utility poles and traffic signal poles and the City can benefit from franchise fee revenues it receives from NextG Networks.
Most importantly, residents, mobile workers and visitors benefit from the expanded and reliable wireless voice and broadband data coverage, capacity and performance. It's a win-win situation.
Benefits
- Expanded, reliable wireless voice and data coverage and capacity
- Supports advanced wireless voice and data services from existing carriers
- Minimizes future construction by using advanced fiber optic technology
- Provides a potential source of revenue for Atlanta
- Increases (redundant) capacity and capability to add new services and operators
- Utilizes inconspicuous equipment
- No need for new towers
Specifications
- Frequency: 800 MHz and 1.9 GHz available
- Traffic: iDEN, CDMA
- Number of Nodes: 50
- Population served: downtown, midtown, suburban and Buckhead
- Miles of fiber: more than 30
- Local operations center
