American wireless major AT&T has revealed its Capex strategies and plans to enhance network capacity in Washington DC during the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump.

AT&T said it will be making an investment of nearly $15,000,000 as part of its Capex plan to more than quintupling network capacity throughout DC to boost the network for the Inauguration.

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AT&T will be adding 4 Eyeball Antennas and 2 Drum Set Antennas on the National Mall for the Inauguration.

AT&T said the Drum Set antenna, the highest capacity antenna on the market, provides 20x more LTE capacity than a traditional cell site and double the capacity of the Giant Eyeball Antenna.

AT&T is deploying seven COWs (Super Cell on Wheels) along the National Mall for the Inauguration and it will be equal to nearly 50 traditional cell sites. Two of the COWs will be equipped with the Drum Set Antenna.

AT&T will increase LTE capacity along the National Mall by 400 percent. AT&T is investing in LTE capacity upgrades to more than 20 cell sites.

Both AT&T and Verizon are making investment in enhancing the network capacity in Washington DC because they are anticipating the arrival of nearly 1 million visitors at the National Mall on Inauguration Day.

# Boosting LTE capacity across DC by 400 percent

# More than 50 network engineers involved in Inauguration network planning and deployment

# 20 new or upgraded Distributed Antenna System (DAS) at big venues including hotels and airports in Washington DC.

# 7 Super Cell on Wheels (COWs)

# Drum Set Antenna provides 20x more LTE capacity compared to a traditional cell site

# 7 COWs on National Mall equal to 50 traditional cell sites.

# 20 permanent LTE upgrades to cell sites

# new permanent 4G LTE cell tower

COWs are portable cell sites that handle spikes in traffic from smartphone users. Each Super COW antenna has at least 10 antenna beams, where a normal cell site would only have one. AT&T’s Super COWs equipped with the Drum Set Antennas have 20 antenna beams each. These provide network capacity 20x that of a normal single beam antenna.

These high capacity COWs are able to better serve a crowd by dividing it into sections, each with its own dedicated antenna beam. The increased beams help to improve customers’ mobile experience by using cellular resources more efficiently.

Since 2007, data usage on AT&T network has grown by 150,000 percent due to the rise in popularity of video streaming apps, and mobile internet usage.

In 2013, during President Obama’s second Inauguration, although the crowd was smaller than 2009, data usage on our D.C. area network was more than 16 times larger than it was during Obama’s first inauguration in 2009.

For the 2013 Inauguration, AT&T deployed COWs to boost coverage along the National Mall.  One Super COW is equal to 6 COWs in 2012 and is able to provide more than 30x network capacity.