RTO Wireless, a Massachusetts company specializing in rural broadband, won competitive bidding to provide broadband service in the two counties.
The contracts were approved Tuesday in Niagara County and July 28 in Orleans County.
FirstNet One LTE blimp used in aftermath of Hurricane Laura
FirstNet One, recently completed its first real deployment providing public-safety communications, as the tethered the aerostat that acts as an LTE tower in the sky supported the response effort in Louisiana during the aftermath of Hurricane Laura, according to AT&T officials.
“This was our first field deployment in a real incident,” Tom Steele, AT&T’s director of strategy and operation for the FirstNet program, said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.
“We were very anxious to get that opportunity, because no matter how much you try to simulate a real emergency, you can’t completely duplicate what’s going on when you respond to a disaster incident like this, when you’re two miles deep into a swamp and trying to avoid alligators, snakes and turtles on the road as you’re trying to get there.”
Unveiled late last year and tested in Tuskegee, Ala., the FirstNet One blimp carries LTE base-station equipment as high as 1,500 feet above ground and is designed to provide LTE coverage to more than 100 square miles for weeks at a time, as the tether connects to an ongoing source of power. An AT&T mobile communications vehicle on the ground provides power and a backhaul connection—typically via satellite, although fiber could be used, if available, Steele said.
AT&T had a waiver from the FCC that would allow FirstNet One to fly as high as 1,500 feet, but most of the post-Hurricane Laura mission was flown at 750 feet, with a high level of 1,000 feet, according to Steele.
“It’s five to six times the footprint that we get out of some of our other assets,” Steele said. “The primary use case [for FirstNet One] would be where we have an area—typically following a hurricane—where we have a number of macro-cell sites out, and they’re expected to be out for two weeks or more “That’s a rule of thumb that we use.
“A lot of its purpose is to give us a larger coverage footprint. Rather than deploying multiple SatCOLTs [satellite cells on light trucks] into an area, we can use those assets a little bit more surgically, out where they need to go, and cover the big swaths where the cell sites are down with the aerostat.”
In addition to providing coverage and freeing the LTE assets, using the FirstNet One aerostat to deliver LTE connectivity also can reduce the burden on personnel in the area, according to Steele.
“Having the larger footprint [from FirstNet One] meant that we didn’t have four or five other SatCOLTs down there covering that,” he said. “So, it probably gave them a little bit of relief, so they could get back to the staging area or back to a hotel room.”
Steele said the FirstNet One blimp was deployed east of Cameron Parish, about halfway to Creole near the Gulf of Mexico. FirstNet One was removed from the area as the terrestrial LTE system came back online earlier this month, he said.
“Some of the macros to the east have come back online, and we have a COW in Cameron Parish,” he said. “Between those two assets, we were covering that expanse of the coast with FirstNet One. But once those cell sites came back up and we were able to get a COW into Cameron Parish, they were able to take over for the footprint that the aerostat was covering.”
From a performance perspective, users leveraging FirstNet One experience similar data throughputs as those who connect via a SatCOLT, Steele said.
“It’s very similar to a SatCOLT,” Steele said. “It’s flying an almost identical radio package as a SatCOLT—it’s a 40-watt macro radio, the same thing we use on many of our cell sites. The limiting factor would be the satellite backhaul.”
FirstNet One is not designed to be part of the first wave of deployable solutions transported to an area. Instead, it is better used after cell-site outages are identified and a longer-term LTE solution is needed for a given area.
When the FirstNet One aerostat is inflated and in position, it can be flown and operational in about 30 minutes—about the same amount of time it takes to bring the aerostat down to the ground, Steele said. However, inflating the blimp requires the wind conditions to be less than 15 miles per hour—something that AT&T personnel had to wait two days to happen in Louisiana.
Once inflated—on its trailer or in the air—FirstNet One is able to withstand much winds as strong as 70 miles per hour, Steele said. Although the aerostat can remain operational at wind speeds up to 50 miles per hour if fiber backhaul is available, the LTE connectivity does not work at such high wind speeds if satellite backhaul is necessary.
“Even though we might leave the aerostat up, we would discontinue service at around 35 miles per hour,” Steele said. “That’s the same as a SatCOLT, because that comes down to a trailer with a big satellite dish on it. If you think about that in a windstorm, it’s basically a big kite. You don’t want that dish deployed over about 30 or 35 miles per hour. What we would do is fold down the dish, discontinue the service for a half-hour or whatever it took to let the front pass, and re-establish service afterward.
“The aerostat itself can operate [in winds] up to 50 miles per hour, so the limiting factor in that would be the satellite trailer.”
AT&T officials recognized the need for a solution like FirstNet One in 2018, when FirstNet SatCOLTs were deployed for about six month in Florida to assist the recovery effort in the wake of Hurricane Michael hitting the Florida panhandle.
“Following events like [Hurricanes] Maria and Michael, where they said, ‘We need something that will cover a bigger footprint to give us flexibility to use some of our other assets’—that’s really where the idea of the aerostat came about,” Steele said. “AT&T was willing to invest the money, the time and the brainpower to go out and make that a reality. That’s why we have the blimp.”
Like other FirstNet deployables, FirstNet One is available to FirstNet subscribers at no additional cost. This deployable program—coordinated by AT&T’s Response Operations Group (ROG)—is among the most-cited benefits of FirstNet, and the FirstNet Authority board specified that part of its first investment would be to enhance the FirstNet deployable portfolio, although the specific solutions have not been announced yet.
“They’re looking at other SatCOLTs, new form factors,” Steele said. “We’re working on some mobile command vans that the Response Operations Group will be able to take out to some of these deployments, so we can provide on-site communications to a base camp or, frankly, to our team that’s deployed down there.”
In Louisiana, not all deployables in use were associated with vehicles, according to Steele.
“We had routers down there. We had cellular boosters with us. We had RDKs [Rapid Deployment Kits housed in pelican cases] down there,” he said. “And a number of those were certainly deployed in sheriff’s stations and EOCs, particularly where you needed to bring a weak macro signal into an in-building-type situation. We had a bunch of those deployed, particularly in the first two or three days.”
Written by Donny Jackson for Urgent Communications
FirstNet One, a Public Safety Blimp, Deployed in Louisiana for Hurricane Disaster Recovery Support
FirstNet’s first blimp is operational and aiding first responders over Cameron Parish, LA in the aftermath to Hurricane Laura, according to AT&T.
The blimp – technically referred to as an aerostat – can fly as high as 1,500 feet and reduces the need for ground-based assets such as satellite Cell on Light Trucks (SatCOLTs), according to Jason Porter, the Senior Vice President for the FirstNet at AT&T.
“FirstNet One is a part of our dedicated fleet of more than 76 deployable network assets – available at no additional charge to public safety agencies on FirstNet,” Porter said in the post. “These assets provide first responders with similar capabilities and connectivity as a cell tower. And no other wireless network provider has deployable network assets dedicated solely and exclusively to public safety, backed by the oversight of the First Responder Network Authority, to help ensure public safety has connectivity when and where they need it.”
FirstNet One was introduced last December. The 55-foot blimp at the time was the 76th deployable network asset belonging to the FirstNet fleet. The blimp can stay aloft for up to two weeks. It’s tethered to a trailer for either satellite or wireline backhaul. It provides double the coverage area of other assets, including SatCOLTs or flying Cells on Wings (COWs) drones.
AT&T has been busy with FirstNet initiatives this year. In July, FirstNet said that it is rolling out spectrum in Band 14 for first responders on existing cell sites in more than 700 markets nationwide. FirstNet also said at the time said it is launching new cell sites to expand rural and cellular coverage.
In June, the FirstNet board authorized an initial $200 million investment to update the network from LTE to 5G. The multi-phase initiative will begin with the FirstNet network core, according to AT&T.
Source: telecompetitor 9/8/20 at 2:26 PM by Carl Weinschenk
WHIN Launching First Aerostat for Broadband
Monday, August 10th 2020, 4:39 PM EDT
By Mary Willkom, Writer/Reporter
WHIN to Launch Indiana’s First Aerostat Providing the Region with Broadband
(WEST LAFAYETTE, IN) Wabash Heartland Innovation Network is planning the launch of an RTO Wireless AeroSite™, home base of the first telecommunications aerostat to be deployed in the United States for rural broadband. The AeroSite™ will support WHIN’s research broadband network, covering ten counties in north central Indiana.
Aerostats allow telecommunications equipment to be located at 1,500-2,500 feet, which provides line-of-sight that is better than terrestrial towers. With the AeroSite™ and its Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) radios, WHIN’s research network will be one of the most advanced rural broadband testbeds in the country.
In partnership with its tech partners WHIN will test innovative solutions to make broadband available in areas of its region that are unserved or underserved. WHIN will publish the technical details of the deployment and its regional impact to policymakers, industry, and researchers.
In addition, a LoRaWAN gateway will be installed on the aerostat that will enhance and extend coverage to the entire WHIN region. It’s the next step toward fulfilling our promise for full LoRaWAN coverage and helps fulfill WHIN’s mission of accelerating the adoption of IoT technology throughout the entire region. The gateways will allow for millions of messages per day to flow through from sensors in agricultural fields and manufacturing facilities, informing decisions that affect the bottom line by reducing costs, increasing speed of operations and making operations more efficient.
“WHIN is committed to ensuring that the Wabash Heartland is a leader in technology innovations for the agricultural and manufacturing industries,” stated Steve Hubbard CEO of RTO Wireless. “The RTO AeroSite™ is perfectly suited for rapidly providing thousands of square miles of wireless coverage, enabling many emerging technologies and applications for these industries as well as rural broadband, remote learning, and telehealth solutions. WHIN’s dedication to the advancement of the region was pivotal in RTO’s decision to establish an AeroSite™ Technologies team and lease a hangar in West Lafayette.”
Aerostats have been used to maintain communications after natural disasters, and by the military, but this will be the first commercial broadband service provided by an aerostat in the country. Right here in Indiana.
About WHIN
WHIN is an innovative nonprofit organization devoted to making the 10-county Wabash Heartland region of north-central Indiana the global epicenter of digital agriculture and next-generation manufacturing empowered by smart IoT technology.
About RTO Wireless
RTO Wireless was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Framingham, MA. RTO is a pioneer in aerostat industry and operates the first commercial deployment of an aerostat for wireless coverage. RTO supports AT&T’s FirstNet One Aerostat deployments under its Network Disaster Recovery unit. RTO offers mobile voice/data; broadband; backhaul; and pervasive IoT connectivity in a neutral host or shared infrastructure model. RTO is a Microsoft Airband partner deploying broadband services to unserved markets in rural America and is led by executives with decades of experience in the telecommunications industry.
