Case Study: Mid-Tex Cellular

Anywave® Addresses Unique Challenges of Rural Operators

The Challenge

Declining roaming revenues•A rural Texas operator needed to create new sources of income to compensate for declining roaming revenueAcquisitions changed competitive landscape•Dobson Cellular acquisition threatened GSM roaming relationship with AT&TLarge geographic territory •8,000 square miles with widely dispersed cell sites made technical field support very time consuming and costlyOverbuild threat•Needed to fend off the threat of nationwide carrier build-out into Mid-Tex’s coverage area

The Solution

Anywave® Software Radio •Multi-standard infrastructure which delivered a »single system for GSM/GPRS and CDMASimultaneous operation of multiple standards on a »single systemRemote software downloads for additional capacity »and standards upgrades

The Benefits

New revenue from second standard•CDMA was quickly and cost-effectively added to the Anywave GSM network, creating new roaming revenue sources with Verizon and AlltelSignificant RAN CAPEX savings•Capital equipment costs were minimized as same hardware platform was used for both GSM and CDMA at each siteEliminated switch CAPEX for second standard•Hosted switch service eliminated the upfront cost of a CDMA MSCReduced backhaul costs•IP-based backhaul reduced cost by sharing backhaul between GSM and CDMA for both voice and dataReduced site maintenance costs•Remote software downloads from a single location reduced cell site visits to implement new standards and add system capacity for growth

Background

Mid-Tex Cellular was very typical of many rural carriers who were operating analog cellular service. Over ten years, Mid-Tex had invested in 34 TDMA 850 MHz cell sites when they started their cellular operation in the vast rural stretches of central Texas. In 2003, Mid-Tex faced a business environment where new wireless stan-dards were being brought to market at a faster rate, which meant they had to replicate their infrastructure investment with every new wireless standard being in-troduced.

The financial viability of being able to keep up with the pace of innovation was a challenge which forced a tough decision upon Mid-Tex: Should they buy, build and support a dedicated, digital cellular infrastructure that could operate only one wireless standard, or should they delay any further investment, knowing that they could fall behind nationwide carriers, lose market share and forego the opportunity for incremental roaming revenue?

Case Study: Mid-Tex Cellular

“Our monthly backhaul costs are literally half what they would have been with other cellular infrastructure approaches because Vanu’s IP-based system shares a common link across GSM and CDMA within each base station.”

- Toney Prather, CEO, Mid-Tex Cellular

The Solution

In March 2004, with an analog system already in opera-tion, Mid-Tex deployed a GSM overlay system by install-ing Vanu’s Anywave GSM/GPRS radio access network into many of their existing sites. The legacy equipment supporting the analog system occupied two entire racks of hardware while the Vanu GSM solution replicated the same system capacity in virtually 1/10 the footprint. At the core of each base station was the Anywave GSM software. Instead of using proprietary hardware com-ponents, such as ASICs, DSPs and FPGAs, the entire GSM standard, including the physical layer, was writ-ten completely in high level C++ software running in a general purpose processing environment. This allowed all of the signal processing functions and GSM standard implementation to run on industry-standard servers. For signal processing, no proprietary hardware com-ponents were used, a significant departure from tradi-tional cellular systems, where hardware “lock-in” is an inherent characteristic that presents price-performance disadvantages to operators over time. The Anywave GSM processing platform was supported by the other major components of the Vanu solution: the RF head, RF duplexer, GPS for timing reference accuracy and a multi-carrier power amplifier (MCPA) which boosts the low power RF signal from the RF head while being able to support more than one wireless standard.

The Challenge

As Mid-Tex Cellular reviewed their operation, they found themselves facing a business with declining roaming revenues. There also existed the threat of nationwide carriers who were acquiring smaller operators while considering rural area build-out of their digital networks where roaming coverage didn’t exist. In response to this, Mid-Tex was looking for a solution that would en-able them to:

Deploy new services efficiently and cost-effectively •without requiring a substantial fork-lift upgrade in-vestment with every new technology deployed;Reduce costly field support visits and long distance •travel every time base station capacity needs to be increased; Reduce backhaul costs; •Avoid the pitfall of growing a network over time with •technology that continues to get older and less ca-pable than new products that enter the market.

Added to this was the challenge that Mid-Tex wanted a solution that would enable them to add new standards in the future without having to incur significant increases in real estate and utility costs at every cell site.

Opportunities for roaming revenues with nationwide carriers had been an important part of Mid-Tex’s ana-log business, but the industry had already transitioned to digital networks. If Mid-Tex didn’t implement GSM, CDMA or both soon, the roaming opportunities for these growth businesses would pass them by. But how could Mid-Tex accomplish their goal of keeping pace with technology without making a major infrastructure investment each and every time they wanted to launch a new service? For this, Mid-Tex wanted one infrastruc-ture solution that could accommodate the technology

they wanted immediately, while being able to use that same system to easily and cost-effectively add future standards.

For help they turned to Vanu, Inc., developer of the Vanu Anywave software radio solution.

Base Station Hut Talpa, TX

Blanket, TX Dish and Tower

The base station server and RF head were co-located at each antenna site while the base station controller (BSC) and other functions were centralized. Industry-standard routers provided IP connectivity between each cell site and the central BSC, which implemented the Anywave GSM software on IT-grade servers connected by gigabit Ethernet.

Once the GSM system was deployed, Mid-Tex was able to quickly add new revenue sources through roaming agreements they structured with T-Mobile and Cingu-lar (now AT&T). It was a win-win situation-- national carriers could increase coverage and revenues with zero investment and Mid-Tex was in a posi-tion to capture incremental subscriber minutes throughout their large geographic territory. In addition, as GSM traffic in-creased, Mid-Tex was able to quickly add capacity to specific base stations via remote soft-ware downloads from a central location, which eliminated the need for cell site visits.

With a healthy GSM business growing well, Mid-Tex then encountered the Dobson Cel-lular acquisition by AT&T, who quickly transitioned their GSM roaming subscribers over to Dobson. Fortunate for Mid-Tex, however, the Anywave sys-tem could quickly add CDMA, which they did in November 2007 when they successfully launched the industry’s first network to simultaneously op-erate multiple standards on a single system. There was no duplication of the base station hardware as CDMA was easily added to each site via remote software down-loads. Cell site operating and capital costs were signifi-cantly reduced through the use of Vanu’s software radio technology, a task which would typically have involved months of logistics planning, inventorying of channel cards, coordination of field support teams and numer-ous site visits to install and optimize hardware at each site.

All standards, GSM/GPRS and CDMA, are currently operating in the 800MHz band and are supported by a

single network. Additionally, there is only one set of RF equipment being shared across technologies. An-other economic advantage was also achieved through Vanu’s partnership with Globecomm Systems Inc., who eliminated Mid-Tex’s large upfront expense to purchase a CDMA mobile switching center (MSC) by providing them with a hosted switch service where Mid-Tex pays on a per-month, per-subscriber basis. This is especially attractive for Mid-Tex, and other rural operators, as the CDMA offering is being used entirely by roamers, not local subscribers, and the amount of anticipated traffic

would not have justified the ex-pense of acquiring a dedicated CDMA switch.

“With the addition of CDMA to our existing GSM network, we carried over 170,000 in-cremental minutes of use in the first three weeks of opera-tion”, said Toney Prather, CEO of Mid-Tex. “Also, our monthly backhaul costs are literally half what they would have been with other cellular infrastructure ap-proaches because Vanu’s IP-based system shares a common link across GSM and CDMA within each base station.”

Prather added, “One other sig-nificant advantage to Vanu’s software radio technology is that it uses off-the-shelf serv-ers for all signal processing. With no proprietary hardware required, that means there’s no lead-time to order product, we don’t have to carry channel card inventory and as our sys-

tem expands, it’s always taking advantage of the latest and greatest price-performance improvements in the computer industry.”

Moore’s Law shows us that computer processing capa-bilities double every 18 months, which enables Vanu to deliver a significant advantage. While traditional cel-lular systems are expanding coverage or capacity based on old hardware designs that are quickly becoming ob-solete, Vanu base stations continue to utilize the newest advances the IT industry has to offer throughout the life of the system. With Vanu’s approach, the carrier’s sys-tem continues to get better over time.

Base Station and Tower Bangs, TX

Power Distribution Unit

RF TX/RX and digitizer

Duplexer

Circuit Breaker Panel

Power Modules

Anywave Signal Processing Server

Power Amplifiers

PA connector panelGPS frequency reference

Vanu Anywave® Base Station

Future Plans

Mid-Tex is well-positioned for the future with Vanu’s Anywave software radio solution. They have been able to create a single system that addresses their business needs today while providing an easy, more cost-effective path to 3G technol-ogy when the time is right. Mid-Tex moves forward knowing that they have the flexibility to add capacity immediately and remotely, when and where it’s needed. And from an operating cost standpoint, they expect to see ongoing reductions in expense, thanks in part to Vanu’s software radio solution.

OneCambridgeCenter•Cambridge,MA02142617-864-1711•www.vanu.com•[email protected]

View of Santa Anna, TX As Seen From the Cell Tower

“A significant advantage to Vanu’s software radio technology is that it uses off-the-shelf servers for all signal processing. With no proprietary hardware required, that means there’s no lead-time to order product, we don’t have to carry channel card inventory and as our system expands, it’s always taking advantage of the latest and greatest price-performance improvements in the computer industry.”

- Toney Prather, CEO, Mid-Tex Cellular