Wire network gets upgrade but still may not bear pope traffic

The nation's two largest wireless carriers, AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., have put nearly $50 million into new wireless capacity on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and other parts of Philadelphia for the data tsunami of social media expected for Pope Francis' visit.

T-Mobile and Sprint also have boosted wireless capacity to maximize cellular spectrum for what officials in the industry say will be a "mass calling event" - similar to halftime at the Super Bowl, a presidential inauguration in Washington, or midnight on New Year's Eve in Times Square.

The enhancements take some areas of Philadelphia near the wireless capacity of densely populated Tokyo.

But it remains possible, even likely, that a one-million-person crowd - such as the one anticipated for Pope Francis' Mass on Sunday on the Parkway - could overwhelm even the best network planning, analysts said.

"When you get into the tens of thousands of people, it is hard for any network to deal with it," Joe Madden, principal analyst with Mobile Experts, a wireless consulting firm in San Jose, Calif., said last week.

"There will be a moment when everyone tries to upload at the same time," Madden said. "It's almost guaranteed that the network will be 100 percent utilized and there will be a lot of blocking."

The big threat, Madden and others said, would be that many people - say 50,000 - try to send a picture, or a data-guzzling video, at the same time when Francis makes the sign of the cross or waves to the crowd.

"This scenario will be 'uplink-centric,' and that's when you get into bandwidth issues," said Narayan Menon, executive vice president of engineering and founder of XCellAir, which helps manage wireless networks. "These are not people who are browsing the Web."

Verizon, AT&T, and Crown Castle International Corp. said last week they had installed 37 "small cell" nodes on light poles between John F. Kennedy Plaza and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, calling these nodes a "targeted surgical solution" that will grab smartphone wireless signals within about 100 to 200 feet.

AT&T has added a permanent cell tower at 17th and Race Streets that will serve parts of Philadelphia, including the Parkway.

AT&T and Verizon also say they will use portable Cells on Wheels (COWS). AT&T has positioned superstrength COWS at the Art Museum and on Logan Square, and installed temporary rooftop cell antennas at 15th and Market Streets and Fourth and Arch Streets.

Data from photos, video, text messages, or phone calls will be captured by the small cells and then sent over fiber-optic lines to a Crown Castle data hub, where it will be handed off to Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile networks for delivery to final destinations. Those three companies are sharing the small cell nodes, a Crown official said.

"All the locations are fiber-optic fed, so they can handle all the capacity that the wireless carriers see fit to provide," said Matt Tomlin, Crown's vice president of sales and business development for small cell networks.

Crown, a wireless infrastructure company based on Houston, owns and operates 40,000 cell towers for wireless carriers across the United States.

At a press event last week, Verizon, AT&T, and Crown officials sought to allay fears of a meltdown as they headed a walking tour of the Parkway near the Franklin Institute. They pointed out the small cell nodes installed over the summer. These rectangular boxes are about four feet long, 12 inches wide, and eight inches deep, and are bolted onto light poles.

"AT&T is giving it all it's got," AT&T engineer Kurt Woehr said.

Woehr, Crown Castle's Pat Slowey, and Verizon Wireless' Joe Slowik would not say how much raw wireless capacity will be available to users.

Made in America fans reported blocked calls during the concert on the Parkway over the Labor Day weekend, an event attended by fewer than 100,000 people and considered a test run for the pope's visit. Crown, AT&T, and Verizon officials said they improved the network after Made in America.

In a statement, Scott Santi, regional vice president of network deployment for Sprint, said the company had added cell sites and made permanent capacity upgrades at the Art Museum, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, the Franklin Institute, and Logan Square.

Comcast says it has added capacity to hundreds of WiFi hot spots in the areas where crowds are expected to gather. It also says it will open its WiFi hot spots to the public - they are usually available only to Xfinity customers. But Comcast, based just off the Parkway, has cautioned that its WiFi network cannot support hundreds of thousands of users.

Verizon began mobilizing 14 months ago, after the World Meeting of Families 2015 was announced for Philadelphia, and has quadrupled its wireless capacity in Center City, said Slowik, a Verizon Wireless operations director for the Philadelphia area. Said Slowik: "We've been throwing at it everything we can."

bfernandez@phillynews.com

215-854-5897@bobfernandez1

Inquirer staff writer Andrew Maykuth contributed to this article.

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All the latest news and information on the pope's visit: www.philly.com/pope

Everything you need to know about getting around during the visit: www.philly.com/popemap

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