ISSUE 03 2014
IN-BUILDING COVERAGE
33
An alternative view comes from Sam Buttarelli, European director at CommScope who sees a growing interest amongst building and venue owners to invest. “With in-building solutions at the moment, finding the right business model is the most important part of the debate and it’s true that in Europe, for example, around 90 per cent of investment here is currently from CSPs,” he says. “One significant change – and driver – is the emergence of specialist companies that focus on installing and maintaining in-building solutions and can facilitate and coordinate activity for particular sectors like airports, stadia or city authorities. For some of these, such as football clubs, the decision is straightforward as they can use it in a number of creative ways to support their business, employing application platforms like Mobbra to engage with their fans.
We believe that enterprises in particular want a multi-operator solution to avoid lock-in and employ BYOD policies. The world also lacks people who have RF design expertise and this limits the deployment of traditional DAS networks at a time when deploying indoor networks within enterprise buildings is increasingly in demand. That’s why we designed the ION-E to allow IT professionals to deploy these systems by, for example, adding network capacity to meet changing usage patterns through a simple click-and-drag. The ION-E self-detects and self-configures its components, while sending alarm notifications when it detects network issues.”
in energy-efficient office blocks means this is a major problem for businesses around the world. This however is a market that is unlikely to be held by the building owners as the CSPs have a vested interest in retaining strong relationships with their enterprise customers and can use a solution like E-RAN as a platform to sell value-added services. Some CSPs have tended to promote multi-operator shared DAS systems in the past, but the challenge of sharing a systems with a competitor is that it removes any ability for the CSP to differentiate – other than on price – and this tends to stifle enterprise- based in-building solutions by limiting them to only very large deployments where there’s sufficient margin to share.”
DAS and beyond For John Spindler, vice president of product management at TE Connectivity: “The conventional thinking about delivering in- building coverage in the past was to deploy pico or femtocells throughout the structure. However this approach presented challenges – each small cell only has a fixed amount of capacity and they often support just one operator. Enterprises will want to provide mobile network access for customers of all mobile service providers and to do so would involve installing individual picocells for each CSP’s frequencies. However, by investing in a Distributed Access System (DAS), businesses can extend the reach of base stations by extending signals throughout the building using a series of small remote antennas. What’s more, DASs are virtually transparent to the network and trouble-free, with the antennas fitting easily onto ceilings and walls. With the rollout of LTE and its enormous new requirements for capacity, DAS will be the most cost- effective and flexible means businesses have of meeting data demands in the workplace.”
Indeed, TE Connectivity recently completed a major DAS deployment at Copenhagen Airport – working with Caverion,
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