Ground forces in wireless wars patrol Atlanta

By Jeffry Scott

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The whole world knows about the air war between wireless giants Verizon and Atlanta-based AT&T Mobility. Last year, they spent $4 billion on TV commercials calling each other names.

What about the land war, the guys grinding it out on the ground?

Every day in Atlanta, a handful of them get into sports utility vehicles equipped with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of high-tech gear and drive hundreds of miles in some of the worst traffic in America.

They do it so you won’t drop a phone call or take forever to send a photograph of your daughter’s soccer game to grandma in Minneapolis.

They do it so Verizon can measure whether the $184 million it put into upgrading its Georgia network in 2009, and the $1.1 billion AT&T has spent on its Georgia network since 2007, paid off with better wireless service for millions of customers.

And they do it so their companies can prove the competitive claims in their TV commercials: AT&T’s, that it has the fastest 3G network; Verizon’s, that it’s got the 3G network with the widest geographic coverage.

DeAnthony Norwood is a Verizon baseline technician, a job about as glamorous as it sounds. For the past four years, he has patrolled North Georgia and metro Atlanta, logging an average of 6,000 miles a month.

While he drives and glances at two laptops in the front seat, on-board computers send and receive data transmissions and cellphone calls every 150 seconds, keeping a record of the speed, clarity and completion rate, and how smooth the signals are handed off from one cellphone tower to another.

He tallies the results on Verizon’s network, and the rival systems of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and MetroPCS.

He doesn’t have to listen to the phone calls, which is a good thing.

The computer has repeated the same two sentences -- “These days a chicken leg is a rare dish,” and  “a jacket hung on the back of the wide chair” -- literally millions of times over the past four years.

“It does that to see how clear some consonants and vowels are transmitted,” Norwood said.

In all those years and miles, Norwood has never had an accident, nor the inclination, unlike millions of motorists driving, speeding or gridlocked in the city, to chat it up behind the wheel.

“I have to pull over if I’m going to make a call,” he said. “It’s a safety issue.”

Eddie Thompson is Norwood’s counterpart at AT&T, but higher up the ladder. Thompson also oversees AT&T’s monitoring team as the manager of radio frequency engineering for the state.

Thompson and his crew only monitor AT&T’s network. The company retains an outside firm, Global Wireless Solutions, to track the performance of Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Clear and MetroPCS.

In Alpharetta recently, Thompson and his boss, David Walker, the Georgia network manager, demonstrated to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution how they track transmissions on transmitters and a laptop that graphically displays signals that were relayed between four cell towers in a 12-mile stretch.

That’s a far cry from the pioneer days of wireless in Georgia. When AT&T launched its service in 1984 with 13 cell towers, customers used car phones with antennas on roofs and 20-pound transmission boxes in the trunk, Walker said.

Today, AT&T estimates there’s one mobile device for each of the approximately 5 million people who live in metro Atlanta.

The number of AT&T wireless sites in metro Atlanta has grown from 13 to more than 1,000. Across the state, the company has about 2,000 sites. Usually the towers, built by independent companies, are shared with rival wireless providers.

Walker said there has to be constant monitoring to see if the terrain has changed, because a new building can interrupt a signal, or if traffic has increased, requiring an upgrade at the site to handle more calls or bandwidth demands, or the addition of another site.

In densely populated areas, cell towers are as close as three-fourths of a mile. In rural areas, the towers, which are as tall as 200 feet, can be as far as 12 miles apart, Walker said.

Without the ground war, the companies couldn’t wage the air war they do and couldn’t make competitive inroads, Paul Carter, CEO of Dulles, Va.-based Global Wireless Solutions, said.

“They’re always making some claim, (that) ‘We have the least dropped calls, we have the most powerful network, we have the fastest, the largest,'” said Carter, who’s been monitoring the networks for a decade. “If they’re going to make a claim, they’ve got to have something to base it on.”