| Neutral Host In-Building DAS |
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| The cure for the wirelessly stranded enterprise | |||
Page 2 of 5 Who owns the problem You might expect this problem rests on the shoulders of the service provider, and this is true—and false—at the same time. A service provider is the licence holder for its slice of the precious and costly wireless spectrum in the corresponding geographies. Barring a few small regional service providers, all the major providers in Canada are business enterprises and are heavily driven by shareholder value, business case and ROI models. Provincial and federal subsidies do help in better distribution of service availability in less lucrative and typically rural/remote regions, but the providers are, for the most part, just following the money in a free-market environment. When it comes to investing in in-building extensions to their macro networks, the providers’ funding model naturally dictates a selective approach based on ARPU (average revenue per user) calculations. Therefore, while many of the high-density and typically public spaces meet the ROI thresholds, there are a significant and growing number of in-building spaces occupied by enterprise entities of all sizes that remain beyond the ROI justification criteria. As more wireless data and other high-tech services are added, radio propagation and penetration inside building spaces suffer more. A wireless macro network build-out by the provider is driven by business judgment and guided by RF planning techniques designed to cover the maximum and heaviest users within a geographic space and with due regard to the dynamics of traffic patterns and demographic changes. The nature of a large majority of in-building coverage problems is typically not the lack of capacity in the macro network but the lack of the facility to distribute that capacity inside in-building venues. Even so, each provider may have a different level of macro capacity and signal strength in any area due to differences in tower locations, technology and relative architectural differences. Service providers are not oblivious to this problem, and there have been innovations in developing smaller base stations. These ‘femto cells’ are basically IP-fed miniaturized versions of macro cell sites, and they have their place in the overall solution set. Being small allows them to be mounted inside buildings and, since they are IP fed, structured cabling can be leveraged for connectivity to the radio backhaul gear. This, however, doesn’t solve the problem for the typical medium- to large-enterprise space, as a femto cell typically works best for venues up to 3000 sf, and is not really a ‘distribution’ solution, which is really what is required for uniform coverage inside buildings. It is more of a capacity drop and, therefore, is unable to provide uniform coverage for medium- to large-size venues. Installing several femto cells to cover larger spaces only results in high cost beyond the ROI threshold, as it leads to waste of precious spectrum to manage overlaps, frequency planning, noise and hand-offs. Even when the provider deploys a femto cell in an enterprise, an in-building distribution system working off one or more femto cells remains the best way to address in-building needs of a vast majority of enterprise spaces. |
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