Content Tracks
Smart & Connected Communities
For civic leaders, connectivity enables resource efficiency, economic development, enhanced public safety and more effective municipal service delivery. The technology, strategy, policies and partners to build the smart city from the internet up is the subject of these educational sessions. Municipalities, public safety professionals, critical communications and commercial suppliers will explore how connectivity underpins the digital economy, accelerates innovation, and allows a city to get ‘smarter.’
Sponsored By: CBNL
Macro Cells
Towers and Edge Infrastructure: The wireless network of the future will support high-reliability, low-latency applications and services in an architecture that requires high density and high capacity distributed computing. What role will traditional tower and macro-cellular owners and managers play in a high-density network architecture with multiple tenants, from mobile carriers to IoT networks to autonomous vehicle networks and municipalities? What is the investment, ROI and business models for the wireless infrastructure community? This series of educational sessions explores the roadmap for the wireless infrastructure industry to continue to provide the essential expertise and vital infrastructure networks need to succeed. From new tower builds to commercial buildings to edge data centers—tower owners have a wealth of new opportunities and challenges in the decade to come.
Sponsored By: Vogue Towers
Private LTE Networks
Connected Property
In addition to supporting wireless capacity growth, wireline bandwidth to homes and businesses is essential over the next decade. Fiber to the home and business is necessary to support the future of content delivery including video, gaming, AR/VR, and other yet-to-be-invented new content and application platforms. Property owners – MTU, MDU, MXU and high-traffic venues – will learn at this educational track how Fiber and fiber-like wireless connectivity will create new opportunities in the real estate business.
Sponsored By: Zinwave
V2i (Vehicle to Infrastructure)
Intelligent Edge Networks
For network operators, in order to achieve the latency requirements of new 5G services – think high capacity, low latency networks to support autonomous driving, AR/VR-type applications and data-intensive smart city initiatives — transporting data to the cloud isn’t enough.
Moving compute, storage and processing power closer to the network edge will be key to delivering on 5G use cases. This decentralization shift to a more intelligent network edge is an integral part of future networks.
What does that edge compute architecture look like? Where does this edge equipment go? Where does the investment – in real estate, power, servers, gateways and other network equipment come from?
This track at Connectivity Expo offers business insight and vision focused on an important area of investment, innovation and interest – for mobile network operators, cloud services providers, data center owners and wireless infrastructure suppliers.
Innovations in Infrastructure
The very definition of wireless infrastructure is undergoing a transformational shift, and this educational track is designed to feature the new thinking, new products and new people driving innovations in infrastructure – including automation tools, UAVs, software solutions (C-RAN), software defined spectrum and more. Carriers, tower owners, municipal governments, property owners (including high-traffic venues) will want to see how technology is changing the business of wireless infrastructure.Sponsored By: CityPole by Comptek
Advocacy
A wide array of industry experts share insight and experience on the most effective approaches to site deployment regulations. Action at the federal level, and at the state and municipal level impact the regulatory environment for wireless infrastructure deployment. These sessions are intended to provide an understanding of these issues and how they affect businesses.
Sponsored By: Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr LLP
Workshops and Partner Programs
Wireless Workforce
The workforce is arguably the most important tangible asset of most organizations. Despite its importance, this asset is often not carefully planned, measured or optimized. Recent surveys indicate that while 80% of employers are concerned about a skills gap, only 40% are actively doing something about it. Workforce diversity and inclusiveness is a business imperative in the wireless industry as it is in all industries reliant on innovation.
This special series of sessions provides an opportunity for companies, organizations and individuals to help improve the proficiency of the workforce that builds, upgrades, and maintains wireless infrastructure, ensuring that America can meet the growing demand for wireless broadband, and enabling the United States to continue to lead in the global telecommunications marketplace.
North Carolina Public Safety Broadband Conference & Expo
Working in collaboration with the North Carolina Department of Information Technology, as well as surrounding State public safety leaders, Connect (X) will add-on to its conference programming a partner program for public safety and emergency response agencies at the Local, Regional and State level to learn more about FirstNet and the public safety broadband network. Attendees will meet to discuss initial plans for deployable networks, applications, resiliency and cybersecurity, as well as how these new functionalities may impact public-safety operations.
Sponsored By: FirstNet Built with AT&T
CBRS Use in Networks and the Enterprise: Addressing Connectivity, Capacity and New Services, Neutral Hosts and Private Networks
Networks and enterprises of all kinds – different sizes, verticals, markets, requirements – share similar challenges and complaints about poor wireless service. This includes insufficient capacity, spotty coverage, expensive equipment, and lack of support for the services they and their customers need. At the same time, Enterprise networks are required to support new services and applications, and keep connected to a denser, more diverse set of devices with wildly different performance requirements.
Citizens Broadband Radio Spectrum (CBRS) provides a platform for operators to advance solutions in all of these areas.
CBRS is a new approach to the use of spectrum where spectrum is shared and coordinated efficiently. The new spectrum paradigm is in the mid-band (3550-3700 MHz) and is technology neutral meaning new innovation can add to its utility and versatility.
CBRS has the potential to enable fixed and mobile, data, voice and video services for a wide range of use cases. These may include solutions for enterprises such as businesses, retail, industrial applications, schools and universities, hotels hospitals, entertainment venues and many more. CBRS also opens the opportunity to build and operate private networks. Now, enterprises can control their own infrastructure and can integrate different network types with ample flexibility.
This CBRS workshop provides a deep examination of the role of the CBRS band and its technology alongside potential uses and opportunities. Leaders from the Wireless Innovation Forum, the national standards organization for CBRS, and the CBRS Alliance, the national LTE focused CBRS industry support organization deliver a program combining business insight and valuable information combined with specific details on the CBRS 3-tiered spectrum sharing framework and related technology solutions.
Who Should Attend:
• Commercial and retail property owners and managers
• Neutral host network carriers; In-building wireless integrators and VARs
• Enterprises, and critical communications enterprises (such as utilities, oil/gas and energy)
• Wireless network operators both indoor and outdoor
• Broadband communications carriers; WISPs, ISPs, cable providers and telcos
• Local Government; Municipalities and Regional Councils
• Schools and education facility managers
• Hospital and healthcare facilities operators
• Venue operators; hospitality and hotels
