Connected Real Estate Magazine - Vol 1 Issue 2 - 53
IN BUILDING & DAS American Tower Gives the Javits Center a SYSTEM UPGRADE BY JOE DYTON B efore any masked marvels or caped crusaders could grace the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center® for the 2013 New York Comic-Con event, American Tower® had to pull off a few heroic feats of its own. American Tower, a Boston-based owner, developer and operator of wireless and broadcast communications infrastructure, was tasked with putting a new Distributed Antenna System (DAS) throughout the 2.1 millionsquare-foot convention center. Under normal circumstances, this request wouldn't be an issue for American Tower-installing DAS is one of its core solutions-however, this proposal was unique. The Javits Center's initial request for proposal was issued in August 2012. The project began in June 2013 with an October 2013 due date to coincide with Comic-Con, leaving American Tower with just four and a half months to complete a project that normally takes six months. Although the production time was less than American Tower was accustomed to, once the company had a clear idea of what the Javits Center team wanted, the process fell into place. After the timeline was confirmed, the project became more about execution and less about how it would be completed in four and a half months. "Once we had a vision of all of the information and communication technology applications that could be enabled by our shared infrastructure solution in mind, the real estate and the associated end users became the focus of our partnership. We were able to realize this through our best in class deployment and on-going operations," American Tower vice president of business development Alex Gamota said. "We were working very closely with the Javits Center and because it is such a large, ever-changing, multi-purpose venue, our goal was to ensure that our deployment was invisible or had as minimal an impact as possible on their core business. While it needed to be operational, it also needed to be seamless. People shouldn't realize how their wireless is being delivered." The American Tower DAS that was to be installed had to work with all major wireless service providers. The system design included 15 sectors that covered all the provider's frequencies, CONNECTEDREMAG.COM 53