People continue to move from rural to urban areas, making for larger cities with greater population density. This urban phenomenon offers an abundance of services, job opportunities, lifestyle options, and diversity. Urbanites enjoy these amenities and don’t seem to be bothered by the multitude of cars, noise, and people that crowd roads, sidewalks, restaurants, stores, and other facilities.
But one thing that does impact city dwellers is the challenge of poor cell phone reception in many of the buildings they occupy. Unfortunately, this occurs frequently because there are so many obstacles in dense city environments that interfere with their cellular signal, such as:
- Tower Interference: Carriers put up many cellular towers in urban environments to meet the service demands of the dense populations in these areas, but the signals from these towers can interfere with each other and cause poor reception.
- High Rise Penetration: It is typical for carriers to put cellular towers 25 to 30 feet off the ground in metropolitan areas. This can impede cellular reception in very tall city buildings because the higher up you go, the worse the signal becomes.
- Construction Project Impediments: Construction surrounding a building – such as high rises, apartment complexes or hotels, and parking structures – can act as an obstruction between cellular towers and buildings. As a result, cellular signals cannot reach and penetrate buildings.
- Building Material Impediments: Raw materials from the building itself can prevent cellular signals outside from penetrating into and throughout the building – such as metal roofs, Low-E windows, reinforced concrete walls, and layers of interior or steel walls.
- Underground Levels: Sub-ground level floors where parking garages, maintenance and administrative offices are often housed have poor cell phone reception because cellular signals do not have good penetration through rock, dirt, and thick cement walls.
- Population Densification: Sometimes there are just too many people simultaneously talking or streaming content on their phones or other cellular devices, and there simply is not enough bandwidth available on the cellular network to handle them all.
Commercial real estate owners in urban environments have all experienced these issues in one form or another, but many are not familiar with the newest technologies to solve the problem in their buildings – within a viable budget.
The Cel-Fi QUATRA active DAS (distributed antenna system) hybrid entered the market two years ago. This disruptive technology improves cellular reception for all major carriers inside commercial buildings. It is a hybrid of two strong and proven technologies: traditional active DAS systems and carrier-grade smart signal boosters.
Active DAS was designed for very large venues, a million square feet and larger. The smart signal booster is built with proprietary technology developed by Nextivity, Inc. It provides advanced intelligence signal processing that optimizes a carrier’s cellular reception and offers the largest cellular coverage footprint of any cellular amplifier in the industry for venues smaller than 30,000 square feet.
With Cel-Fi QUATRA, it is no longer necessary for commercial real estate developers or owners to spend months or even a year or more negotiating contracts with multiple carriers to bring uniform, high-quality cellular service inside their buildings.
Using the active DAS hybrid, even buildings in the 500,000 square feet range can have good cellular reception throughout for a fraction of the cost of active DAS solutions – in a matter of weeks. System integrators who have relied on active DAS solutions in the past are now realizing that it is possible to achieve the necessary level of cellular coverage inside urban buildings more quickly and cost-effectively than traditional systems – helping commercial real estate owners achieve their business goals sooner than ever before.
For examples on how Cel-Fi QUATRA solves indoor cellular reception problems in urban buildings, download these case studies.
About the Author
Dean Richmond is the Senior Director of Marketing at Nextivity. Over the span of his career, he has developed strategies and launched products across the information technology and wireless product spectrum. Dean has built strategic partnerships between channel partners, operators, broadband providers, and brands such as Microsoft, Google, Intel, Sony, and Toshiba to grow business units successfully. For more information, contact hello@cel-fi.com or visit www.cel-fi-com
