What It Takes to Build A Network In Waimea Valley

Waimea Valley is an intact ahupuaʻa, the traditional Hawaiian land division running from mountain to sea. It stretches across 1,800 acres of Oahu’s North Shore, and its botanical gardens contain more than 5,000 species. At the end of a three-quarter mile trail is a 45-foot waterfall.

Waimea Valley welcomes more than a thousand visitors a day. Until Tasa Hawai‘i began its deployment, once they passed through the gates, they largely lost cell service.

The Valley stayed disconnected for good reason. Building a tower or small-cell site inside a conservation easement owned by a Native Hawaiian nonprofit would mean permitting, environmental and cultural review, extensive construction and millions of dollars in capital. All of that would have to be justified by traffic generated primarily from visitors who spend a few hours in the valley and then leave.

For a traditional carrier, the economics of building out reliable coverage in a culturally and environmentally sensitive location like Waimea Valley never made much sense. 

That’s where Tasa Hawai’i stepped in. 

Tasa’s Background

Tasa Hawai’i is a two-man operation led by Viktor Savchenko and William Todd. Savchenko evaluates locations , engineers the network architecture, and designs deployments, while William manages materials, logistics, and much of the physical work required to turn those designs into functioning networks.

Savchenko started his career as a data center technician in New York City before moving into systems administration, network engineering and fiber optic deployments. He also wrote the MikroTik conversion guide distributed by Helium to help other deployers convert and configure compatible MikroTik equipment for use with the Helium Network.

As a network engineer, he looks for places where Helium’s technology and a different infrastructure model can solve connectivity problems that conventional cellular deployments cannot economically address. Waimea Valley was exactly that kind of place.

And Waimea is not Tasa’s only large-scale deployment.

Tasa has also launched a massive carrier-offload site in downtown Honolulu that now offloads nearly 600 GB of cellular data every day, demonstrating that the same underlying model can work at the opposite end of the spectrum: from a remote, environmentally sensitive valley with virtually no cellular coverage to one of Hawai‘i’s densest urban environments.

Building Through the Valley

Savchenko’s first step at Waimea Valley was to bring fiber deep into the property, along the length of the tail. The deployment reused approximately 30-year-old conduit wherever possible and transitioned between underground and above-ground infrastructure where the terrain required it.

Because the Valley is culturally and environmentally protected, the network could not simply be installed wherever it was easiest. Infrastructure had to be carefully integrated into the existing environment and made as unobtrusive as possible.

The initial build took roughly three months. Much of it happened after visitors had gone home for the day, sometimes stretching past midnight.

Maintaining infrastructure in Waimea Valley can be just as challenging. The area receives substantial rainfall, and tropical weather, moisture, and vegetation continually test equipment, fiber, cabling, and supporting infrastructure.

Over the past couple of years, Tasa’s infrastructure in the Valley has suffered significant damage on multiple occasions, including damage caused by severe weather and storms, and even an incident of vandalism.

Each time, the network has been repaired and brought back online.

Tasa keeps going because Waimea Valley and its visitors have come to rely on the connectivity the network provides. What began as an effort to bring service into an area with little usable cellular coverage has become part of the Valley’s everyday infrastructure.

Today, 14 active Helium Plus access points provide coverage along the route from the visitor center to the falls.

“We transitioned from Helium Hotspot deployments to Helium Plus across all of our coverage areas and that allowed us to get a significant boost by tailoring the operation according to the location's needs,” Savchenko said. 

That tailoring included one feature aimed at the valley's geography. Coverage runs three-quarters of a mile from the visitor center to the falls, so a visitor's phone passes through several access points on the walk, and the network hands it off between them without dropping the connection.

"One reason we are fully migrated to Helium Plus is to offer 802.11r fast transition, to allow visitors and employees to roam without interruption," Savchenko said. "That's very important to have on such a stretch of the property."

The New State Of Coverage in Waimea Valley

Waimea Valley sees about 1,200 to 1,300 visitors on a typical day. 

Over a recent 30-day period, an average of roughly 1,206 devices per day connected through the Valley’s network, meaning the network is touching a substantial portion of the Valley’s daily visitor population.

When Savchenko began deploying on the Helium Network, much of the opportunity centered on carrier offload. Waimea Valley presented almost the inverse problem. There was very little cellular coverage available to offload in the first place.

Instead, Savchenko saw an opportunity to bring connectivity to a popular part of the island that traditional network economics had effectively written off.

Carriers have to prioritize where they invest, and those decisions naturally favor locations  with enough population density, traffic and revenue to justify the cost of construction. Locations that fall below that threshold can remain underserved for years. State parks, fairgrounds, stretches of coastline, or hiking trails, coastlines and other outdoor recreational locations are common examples. 

Waimea Valley did not need a multimillion-dollar cellular tower.

It needed fiber, months of difficult field work, carefully placed wireless infrastructure, and a network model that made building there economically possible.

From Waimea Valley to Waimea Bay

The latest expansion brings Tasa’s network closer than ever to Waimea Bay, one of the most recognizable surfing locations in the world.

Waimea Bay is also home to The Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational, the legendary big-wave surfing event that can draw enormous crowds to the North Shore when conditions are right.

If Tasa can bring the same model beyond the Valley and toward the beach, the project could demonstrate something much larger than a successful deployment at a single attraction: that community-scale wireless infrastructure can bring meaningful cellular connectivity to places where building another traditional tower is impractical, uneconomical, or simply not an option.

Learn more about deploying Helium Plus and reach out to business@helium.com.