Since its founding in 2000, B+T Group has evolved from a structural engineering firm into a one-stop wireless engineering shop that offers a full suite of wireless infrastructure managed services.
And the company’s newest offering, Site360, promises to be a game-changer for tower stakeholders ranging from owners to carriers to independent field crews.
The ambitious Site360 product, employs a novel technique called photogrammetry to create three-dimensional interactive maps of towers, compounds, antenna configurations and all other physical aspects of telecom site.
Imagine thousands of individual photographs, detailing every angle of a site and attendant equipment, fed into an engine to create a seamless, hyperaccurate map of a site all delivered in a secure client interface—that’s what photogrammetry and Site360 provides.
“Today,” B+T Group CEO and co-founder Chad Tuttle said, “A tower owner and all of the clients, carriers on a tower, are visiting these sites multiple times for different reasons. Our idea is to go out and visit the site one time, gather all of the information, and then when somebody needs something they just call in and we’re able to provide that.”
The end result is a more efficient, more economic and safer process for conducting physical analysis and planning. The Site360 map can be remotely accessed and used to verify configurations and inventory, check component serial numbers, plan modifications and many other tasks that, up until now, required dedicated and costly resources.
Vice President of Engineering Peter Smith added that Site360 “takes the human error and translational error out completely. We’re really taking it to the next level. We send a climber and a photographer out there and we can give clients more information than they’ve ever seen before right from their desktop.”
“There’s not a lot like us in the entire country,” Tuttle told RCR Wireless News.
“We self-perform the large majority of the activities starting with the site acquisition, through engineering, and all the way through construction and optimization of equipment.”
Smith added that at B+T Group, “Our version of the term turnkey is quite a bit more generous than some of the other companies in the space.”
Building on its structural engineering roots, B+T Group has developed expertise in tower analysis and modification, architecture and engineering services, and inspection and audit capabilities.
To keep pace with emerging technologies, B+T Group has taken a forward-leaning approach to support clients dealing with distributed antenna systems and small cell deployments, which are poised to take-off in 2015 and continue gaining momentum with widespread carrier adoption.
“We’ve grown and added silos of expertise based mainly on the personality and vision of B+T,” Smith said. “We’re always growing to meet demands of the clients. It’s a very can-do, young-natured company in that way.”