“I would not have been able to get the money for multiple DASs,” said Tommy Russo, chief technology officer at Akridge, a real estate company headquartered in Washington, DC, that uses a Mobile Access hybrid DAS. His 12-story building stretches 500,000 square feet both above and below ground and serves both internal Akridge employees and other office tenants—a total of about 1,000 users a day.
Because Akridge and its tenants use any number of carrier services, Russo installed the Mobile Access DAS in June 2006 to support three of the four major carriers, some Wi-Fi, and 900MHz/800MHz private walkie-talkie networks in a single system. The project cost about $300,000, Russo said.
At the other end of the spectrum is The Venetian casino and hotel in Las Vegas, a Sands Corp. property that supports 40,000 users wandering the property at any given time. Its in-building system was installed about seven years ago and, as such, supports five different overlay DASs to distribute cellular signals from the AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, legacy Nextel iDEN and T-Mobile networks.
“We have multiple DASs, because back then the operators didn’t want to share the other guys’ antennas,” said Steve Vollmer, The Venetian’s vice president of IT and chief technology officer. On the other hand, The Venetian brings in enough business to motivate the carriers to fund and operate the systems. With the operators assuming full responsibility for the indoor installation, operations management and service levels, the complexity of the installation is more or less irrelevant to the property’s owners/managers. And The Venetian’s capex/opex is $0.
“Now, there are DASs available that will share antennas,” said Vollmer, who has invited all the carriers to the table to discuss covering the new 3,000-room Palazzo Resort, Hotel and Casino—another Sands property set to open in Las Vegas this month. “We will let the carriers call that shot [to use such systems] if they care to.”
Procurement Options And Issues
In-building systems can be procured from the carrier, an integrator, or directly from the DAS supplier. “Carriers are a big channel, but we’re seeing enterprises more actively searching for in-building solutions,” said John Spindler, vice president of marketing at LGC Wireless. “So we now sell direct to them.”
Operators will generally work with large customers or their DAS supplier or integrator up front to determine what needs to be done to boost indoor coverage. Sometimes minor antenna adjustments to the macro network can improve coverage, or a new cell site might be coming to the area, said AT&T’s Erickson.
Phil Martin, managing partner at Oxys LLC, a wireless consultancy in Jupiter, FL, said that if the implementer “doesn’t work with the network guy, all other things become second. The DAS vendor won’t know all the macro cell issues in that location.”
ABI’s Shey agreed: “Clearly, there has to be a relationship between the DAS vendor and the carrier.” He added that where the relationships get thorny is in multi-tenant office buildings.
“If in-building coverage is poor, typically the building owner will expect the operator to finance and install an in-building system. However, operators typically do not do this in buildings where it is hard to determine how many tenants are their customers and how long they will reside in that location.”
In addition, each carrier has its own approach to CPE, said Richard Glasgow, president of integrator Glasgow Group.
“Verizon wants you to take their signal off the air via a rooftop antenna and mini-base station, then distribute it via the DAS. T-Mobile wants a T1 interface into your building from its own central office,” he said.
The main issue with the carriers, he said, is that, “unless the enterprise has leverage, you’re at the carrier’s mercy. No carriers have said ‘no’ [to supplying a base station],” Glasgow said. “But they tend to be extremely busy and this is not a priority.”
K&L Gates, for example, saw its LGC Wireless dual-network DAS installed, but had to wait 18 months for Verizon Wireless to supply an RF source for its CDMA-based network, even though K&L was able and willing to pay for it, said Carson. The reason? K&L was not a Verizon Wireless business customer; it was installing the Verizon in-building system to serve the personal needs of its employees and, in particular, to get them coverage in the subterranean floors of its new building.
However, the law firm received its base station from T-Mobile—with whom it is a subscriber to BlackBerry service for about 800 handsets—in about three months.
“If the enterprise is willing to pay, in almost all cases, the carrier will be willing to make [internal coverage] happen,” said Jeff Kunst, vice president of marketing at Mobile Access. “But the timetable is questionable, particularly for a multiservice system where there is just a small population of users for a given carrier.”
Carrier Certification Important
Each mobile operator has a list of equipment that it has certified to use on its licensed airwaves. When it comes to repeaters, which are less expensive than microcells and DASs, a number on the market are not certified. Uncertified equipment can cause problems in the outdoor (“macro”) cellular network and provide unreliable performance, so certification is important.
Technically, selling repeaters that have not been certified by the carrier who owns the licensed spectrum with which it will work is illegal, noted AT&T’s Erickson.
“It’s our spectrum, and we guard it jealously,” he said. “You can go to the Internet and take your pick of repeaters that could interfere with our network; it happens every day. There have been situations that, because of the way a repeater was installed, we’ve had quality-of-service problems in the surrounding cell sites.”
Erickson said AT&T is working with the cellular industry’s association, the CTIA, to “get the FCC to put more teeth into this.”
Implications For FMC
What does the uptake of in-building cellular systems mean for fixed-mobile convergence, or FMC, whereby a single device works seamlessly across multiple types of cabled and wireless networks without dropping sessions?
The turning point will come when dual-mode cellular/WiFi handsets grow abundant, said Craig Mathias, principal at Farpoint Group, a wireless consultancy in Ashland, MA. “If you only have a single-mode [cell] phone, you need in-building cellular,” he said. Mathias estimates that there are about 100 dual-mode phone models available worldwide and about 50 available in the U.S.
For The Venetian’s employees, “We have an interest in combining the PBX with mobility,” said Vollmer. “We’re looking to blend our PBX with the cellular network, take advantage of better rates and run [usage] through the call accounting system to track calls.”
Akridge’s Russo, too, sees cellular as the mobility foundation for his organization. His opinion is that “WiFi phones aren’t prime time. I’m not going to spend half a million dollars on a [WiFi/IP-PBX] phone system.”
Mary Kay’s Brent Frerck agreed, saying he doesn’t consider WiFi to be a mobile solution. “I know there are early solutions that hand off from WiFi to cellular, but I hear they don’t work right, and calls still drop. It complicates the infrastructure more than is necessary,” he said.
He said he sees the future for cellular “only getting brighter” for the applications at Mary Kay: “We want the vice president of manufacturing to be able to leave the plant 15 miles away, be on a conference call while driving to headquarters, pull into our garage, get in the elevator and not lose his connection.”
He said he envisions one day having no desktop phones and having the PBX functions on a wireless device. “But we want to be able to cost-justify it and we want it to be stable first.”
Joanie Wexler is a freelance technology editor/writer based in California's Silicon Valley.
