-
- Miramar Plaza
- 954 Avenida Ponce de Leon
- Office 201A
- San Juan, Puerto Rico 00907
- + 1 (787) 721 3953
Connectivity is vital and transformative, but that does not mean it’s available everywhere that it should be. Especially in crowded cities, it has become increasingly difficult to use traditional solutions like cell towers to offer connectivity. What used to be hundreds of devices searching for signal in a neighborhood now easily numbers in the thousands.
Imagine a busy street in a shopping area at lunchtime, or even a subway station at 8:30 am. While these packed areas generally have coverage, telecommunications networks often do not have the capacity to manage the demand for data. If you then add factors like licensing restrictions, availability of viable sites, urban planning rules, or economic feasibility, the picture becomes even more complex.
Without innovative infrastructure solutions, these regions may not get the connectivity they deserve. In other words, you could have five bars of 5G signal but not be able to send a text or make a phone call.
smartphones
user/month in cellular data usage
more data traffic than with 4G LTE
Sources: Statista, Cisco
How to guarantee the connectivity of users, in terms of coverage or capacity? It’s simple! It is only possible to use infrastructure solutions that are more flexible and adapted to the urban environment.
Data demands are overwhelming today’s networks
“Being online” has become a constant in people’s everyday lives. We already produce on average 44 trillion gigabytes of data per year, a tenfold increase since 2013. With this quantity of data, you could make a stack of 128 GB iPads and reach two-thirds the distance to the moon. And that number continues to grow exponentially. Since the COVID-19 lockdowns began, Internet traffic has increased 40%: 1 year of growth in 1 quarter.
What options are there to ensure that people can connect to what really matters? Clearly, traditional cell towers cannot work in every situation where we need strong cellular signal. When you’re “on the go” in a crowded square and need to take an important call, you need another layer of connectivity to ensure that call goes through.
In the end, we need infrastructure solutions that are more flexible and adaptable to the urban environment. The key is to utilize low-height wireless systems, which term Street Level Solutions (SLS), that leverage urban street furniture to improve wireless signal.
More buildings and structures lead to more physical barriers that impede a mobile signal as it tries to reach devices. These obstacles to line of sight may compromise connectivity. Oftentimes, it is not possible to build or expand the traditional footprint of large towers to address this problem. Not to mention zoning limitations that prohibit normal towers from being installed.
Urban areas are not alone in their explosive growth. Suburban and rural municipalities have expanded as well, and so have their connectivity needs. They all have experienced the digital revolution.
In rural areas, for instance, the agriculture sector has reinvented itself to improve efficiency and drive better product yields through technology. Faster production, with less waste and lower costs, is increasingly tied to and driven by strong connectivity.
As is the case in large urban centers, new telecommunications infrastructure also faces challenges in suburban and rural areas. Environmental, architectural, and economic considerations can all limit options and users’ ability to stay connected.
10 to 15% of American farmers use IoT technologies on the farm
There were approximately 75 million IoT devices in the US in 2020, and adoption is forecast to grow at 20% annually.
Source: Alpha Brown
Amidst all of these obstacles to expanding telecommunications infrastructure, QMC has developed an ideal SLS product to address the growth in demand under otherwise restrictive environments.
Street Level Solutions (SLS) is the development of low height solutions that leverage the available urban street furniture in order to improve the coverage of wireless carriers.
SLS can be a solution for two main issues:
Let’s pretend for a moment that cellular signal is like a busy avenue. Every day, hundreds of cars drive on the avenue, but there is a limit to how many cars can be on the avenue at any given time. One way to solve this problem would be to expand the number of lanes available; akin to, for instance, to building more towers. But imagine that there is no more space that a city can utilize to expand the lanes. The same can happen with cellular carriers and macro towers.
In this case, another solution would be to increase the number of streets surrounding the busy avenue, providing cars with an alternative means to reach their destination (with a little help from Waze) while reducing the overall number of cars on the avenue. That is how SLS works. It provides alternate routes for the data traffic to reach its final destination.
SLS consists of connecting the operator’s current network to propagation points closest to the user. This solves the capacity and / or coverage problems discussed above, in addition to ensuring that the transmission component is also resolved.
We are here to consistently co-create the best technical solutions for carrier networks. We have the tools, experience, and technical knowledge to work side-by-side with carrier partners and ensure that we serve their interests.
As a company, we are focused on building and maintaining the in-house engineering expertise necessary to design, together with our clients’ RF teams, the best solution to their needs.
We are willing to break with traditional funding models for wireless infrastructure, and that extends to our SLS solutions. We creatively leverage local partners and federal, state and municipal incentives to lower overall total cost of ownership (TCO).
In addition, we always look for ways to form partnerships to expand our geographic reach and capillarity through the assets which we have under agreement.
We are proud to have been innovators in the small cells and fiber infrastructure ecosystems in the markets where we operate. It’s deeply rooted in our technical team’s DNA. We have accumulated deep knowledge and experience in construction, maintenance and development of fiber optic networks.
Besides that, when we turn in a project, we maintain constant monitoring through our Network Operations Center (NOC). All of our clients will always have easy access to us to resolve any questions or concerns.
We have several partners and exclusive contracts for urban furniture. There are tens of thousands of options that only QMC can offer to build your SLS structure. The points are strategically located where we usually encounter problems with the telecommunications networks and the infrastructure is available for your use.
The traditional Central Beach fireworks display in Balneário Camboriú attracts tourists from around the world for Brazil’s second largest New Year’s Eve party. The New Year’s Eve countdown featured more than 1 million people celebrating on the shore, and one of the biggest improvements was guaranteeing that cell signal worked for all of these tourists, allowing them to wish “Happy New Year” to all of their family and friends through mobile connectivity.
Yes. All QMC SLS systems are 100% licensed from an infrastructure perspective. QMC has a team of regulatory experts who ensure that its SLS installations are properly licensed with municipal authorities.
Yes, they are 100% compatible. Through the implementation of SLS systems, we prepare wireless carriers and the cities in which they operate for the new demands that 5G will bring. Our SLS systems not only provide greater speed and more reliable cellular connections, but they also enable greater security.
QMC is 100% responsible for the preventive and corrective maintenance of its SLS systems. QMC responds to calls regarding outages 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and ensures its systems are within the scope of previously established SLAs.