ISSUE 03 2014
IN-BUILDING COVERAGE
31
Bringing coverage in from the cold
There are approximately 30 billion square metres of indoor commercial real estate on the planet but only two per cent of that is served by in-building mobile wireless services. Alun Lewis looks at the potential of this environment
O
ne of the big themes at Barcelona this year involved in-building coverage. While there’s general agreement on the need to dramatically improve cellular coverage inside businesses and
public spaces, it’s fast becoming clear that new techniques are going to be needed if we’re to satisfy the huge and still growing demand for permanently connected ways of living and working. Those solutions also have to be able to support the different business models needed to justify investment in in-building coverage – whether it’s by the building owner, the CSP or the enterprise itself.
Professor Simon Saunders, director of technology at consultants Real Wireless, lays out the lie of the land: “In- building coverage is going to be a competitive necessity for building owners, retailers and others – but delivering sufficient indoor coverage will require substantial investment with millions of new systems needed. For example, in one scenario we found that to reliably provide a data rate of just 2Mbps for the UK, around 7.5 million indoor coverage solutions will be needed by 2016.”
When it comes to CSP strategies, Saunders sees a range of opinions in the market. “Some CSPs will recognise this need and will aggressively use coverage in these locations as a competitive weapon, while others simply won’t get it and will lag in the race to deliver the service their customers need. The industry is recognising that competition on coverage isn’t dead – the chance to provide reliable services everywhere represents a fantastic opportunity to be different. Some carriers are seeing this as an opportunity – by re-engineering processes they can significantly reduce costs and deployment times, installing small cells quickly and cheaply as a ‘land grab’
TE Connectivity recently completed a major DAS deployment at Copenhagen Airport with Caverion, one of Europe’s largest designers, builders and maintainers of commercial premises
to win those buildings. This created an outstanding business case for them as demonstrated in a recent analysis that we carried out for the Small Cell Forum – The Business Case for Enterprise Small Cells and that’s available on our website.”
Who’s going to provide the coverage? The challenge – and potential – of serving this environment is huge. Research pulled together by CommScope to support the recent launch of their ION-E intelligent in-building solution suggests that there’s approximately 30 billion square metres of indoor commercial real estate on the planet – but only two per cent of that is currently served by in-building mobile wireless services. As customer expectations rise – smartphone owners expect a webpage to load in under four seconds – and BYOD
Alun Lewis Freelance telecoms journalist
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