What if you wanted to download a movie to watch on your next flight, and instead of taking several minutes on the airport WiFi, it could take seconds on your mobile device?

5G technology is set to make that happen, but first the infrastructure to support this next generation of network connectivity needs to be deployed.

That’s where FDH comes in, putting its expertise to work by helping service providers deploy and maintain their infrastructure. So eventually you won’t have to wait to download that movie.

“You see antennas and radios frequently being swapped out,” says Dana Clauson, AE Services Manager at FDH. “Most of the time, they’re doing away with TMAs, which are tower-mounted antennas, and radios are being decommissioned, and they’re replacing them with integrated antennas, antennas that have radios built into them, that have the ability to use multiple different bands the carriers need.”

“These are many of the things we’re seeing over time on the macro side,” he continues. “And … a lot of small cells are also being added in to supplement those bigger, more densely populated areas that really require the bandwidth the networks are trying to support.”

The transition to 5G requires not only improvement to technology, but also an understanding of the concerns and needs of local communities and the government officials who represent them during the rollout process.

“One of the changes with 5G is our clients, the carriers and the tower owners – they’re very used to just replacing equipment that’s on the tower. With this new 5G technology, there are these additional steps of running the fiber and finding different locations for the equipment to go on that’s not a standard tower,” says Krystyn Perez, PE, FDH Vice President of Engineering. “There are a lot of jurisdictions that were not originally a big fan of having a new panel on every light pole in the city every 200 feet, so a lot of those things have come up with the 5G change.”

Perez adds, “We’ve taken a lot of steps to make sure we understand the technology, understand what the jurisdictions are going to require for approval of these installations, and understand what the carriers are trying to do with their site locations so we can do what we need to help them get their site installations approved.”

“We get calls all the time with challenges that seem insurmountable to our clients,” says Chad Barham, Director of Client Services. “A lot of our efforts on the client services side are defining what the clients' biggest issues are and defining ways to overcome them.”