That’s how officials in one Maine town improved their signal strength.
“What you are doing is, you are propagating a signal into your community that shows that the community is connected, and it is able to sort of step forward into the 21st century,” said George O’Keefe, town manager and economic development director in Rumford, Maine, explaining his town’s decision to use its streetlight infrastructure to support 5G communications technology. O’Keefe outlined the project during an Oct. 22 webinar to discuss the technology and partnerships. The event was organized by TechConnect, which hosts the Smart Cities Connect Conference and Expo.
Rumford, a small historic town of about 6,000 residents which also accommodates a large number of visitors, sought to use its streetlights as wireless communication nodes with technology from Ubicquia in the form of a “street radio.” A device about the size of a book, it enables the deployment of a 5G signal across the coverage area after which the 5G signal can be backhauled by the existing fiber communications network.
“We know experientially that we have a need. We also know, from an economic development standpoint, that we want to have a 5G signal in the community,” O’Keefe said.
“The other thing we know is where our fiber infrastructure is,” he added. “And so, if you know where your fiber lines are, going in and out of your community, then you have the ability to help Ubicquia, as a partner, identify sites for potential 5G deployment, sort of alongside the carriers, to sort of work through what kind of a footprint really works for everybody.”
These solutions, said Mike Irizarry, executive vice president and chief technology officer for UScellular, can help eliminate the need for costly and unsightly cell towers.
“To be able to deploy this technological solution in a way that has really, I think from our perspective, zero visual impact … is really foundational to our ability to engage in this opportunity, and to see the value that the opportunity presents,” Irizarry said in comments on the panel.
The rise of remote work, the communication needs of modern life and smart city technologies all require stable and consistent communications, experts say. Streetlights are a common feature to cities of all sizes, and being typically located around 150 feet apart gives them an inherent network structure.
“There’s nearly 60 million streetlights throughout the United States,” said Dave Wong, Ubicquia vice president of site acquisition and deployment. “It’s really plug-and-play.”
“This allows wireless operators to strategically deploy additional capacity, additional coverage, without spending hundreds and hundreds — a million dollars — deploying large cell sites, and everything else,” Wong said during the panel. “This really makes it easy for the operators to deploy.”
Rumford had been involved in talks to improve wireless communications for some time, its town manager said. The town had floated various initiatives, ranging from deploying public Wi-Fi to developing a municipal broadband project and other technologies.
“We had sort of heard of, and looked at, a lot of options,” he said, adding the 5G-mounted streetlight technology, “takes us out of the position of having to create a utility from scratch, manage it ourselves, and then find some solution that either monetizes it, or allows us to collect revenues to maintain it.
“This is, in my opinion, the height of what a public-private partnership is supposed to look like,” O’Keefe said. “Which is, the private sector comes in and deploys its capital, and its technology … and we provide our public rights to access certain types of infrastructure.”
