February 2017 | Business View Magazine

60 61 vironmental and regulatory standpoint, we have experts that handle the approvals. From an engineering standpoint, the physical designing of the structure of the installation, the architectural and engineering drawings –we handle that in-house. And, of course, there’s the phys- ical construction of the facility. And, on the back end, there would be technical services, where we’re doing installation and commissioning of the electronics.” Koziel is keenly aware that the pace of change in the wireless sector is ongoing and relentless. “It changes every day,” he says. “Every day, we have to learn and evolve quickly to keep up with the pace of transition in the telecom market.We’ve just come off of a major 4G global ini- tiative where all of these networks have been upgraded to provide 4G service, and we’re now doing trials for 5G. 5G is not going to be com- mercially viable in the U.S. until roughly 2020, but we’re doing trials now with our customers. And, in order to do that, you’ve got to learn a new product; you’ve got to learn a new scope of work and in some SACWireless cases, the type of tools and equipment that we’re using for this imple- mentation changes very quickly.” In addition, the networks are growing in size: “The big challenge in our industry that’s ahead of us now is: ‘how are we going to prepare for taking on the sheer volume and size of the networks?’ Five years from now, we will be talking about two to three times the number of facilities, or access points, that are out there. Not only are you going to have all of the existing sites, which is in the hundreds of thou- sands, currently, that need to be upgraded, at the same time, you’ll have many more nodes in more metropolitan markets. So how do you accomplish that?” Koziel answers his own question: “You focus on doing things differ- ently. So, something that SAC has created and fine-tuned is what we call ‘The Engine Room.’ It’s a process and methodology that we use for deploying a high volume of networks, with a tremendous level of