Phoenix Childrens Hospital: Inbuilding with DAS

PHOENIX – As Arizona grows, the Phoenix Children’s Hospital must follow suit, and this includes the wireless networks needed to run in its health care facilities.
Three years ago, the hospital started a $538 million expansion to transform the center into a pediatric medical campus to accommodate the country’s fifth-largest metropolitan population and almost one million children who live there. The PCH forecasts that 1.5 million children will live in the Phoenix area by 2030 and many more beds, physicians, infrastructure and equipment will be needed to keep pace.
Duane John, project manager with TriPower Group, is leading the team hired by the hospital to install a distributed antenna system into the building. John says a DAS system the size of the one being deployed at the hospital could be put together in three months, but due to the fact that the construction schedule of the entire build must also keep pace, it’s taken a couple of years to install the DAS thus far. The DAS is now tested and operating under all the signal
requirements with only carrier infrastructure left to complete it.
The hospital relies on the DAS for two-way radio, paging and commercial mobile services delivered over smartphones throughout the entire campus and according to John, a DAS is the only way to get these services operational in a hospital setting.
“Bringing anything that is RF inside the building is the problem,” said John. “The possibility of having the coverage on your smartphone to do those sorts of things inside a building without a DAS is minimal.”
During the two-year build, TriPower, which is a DAS system integrator, designed and built the multi-carrier DAS using the Solid Technologies Multi-Carrier DAS platform to meet the hospitals requirement for a converged system for public safety and commercial mobile services.
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, federal guidelines were put in place for a requisite amount of communication between floors for fire, police and rescue teams that usually amounts to a suggested requirement of approximately 95% of coverage.
“Generally speaking, any building that’s above three stories would warrant looking into putting something into it like a DAS,” said John.
Having only one DAS system to deploy in a large area such as a hospital can lower costs, and provide for less mess when integrating the system from floor to floor.
The Solid product line in this build uses one fiber to come in optically from the head end, converts to radio frequency in the remote optical units and is sent from coax out to the antennas within the region as ROU services.
“The filtering system in the ROUs and the head end for Solid is much cleaner and tighter than most other product lines,” said John. “They’re keeping up with emerging technologies such as LTE to keep up with carrier demands.”
The PCH build has 12 floors with eight remote locations servicing the entire building. There is 800 MHz band frequency for non-emergency units being operated and a communications systems for UHF channels for the hospital’s engineering, facilities and security staff. Emergency
services for the hospital’s 450 MHz critical services are not yet determined for placement on the DAS.
All carriers are slated to be on the neutral host network with Verizon Wireless already on, and Sprint Nextel Corp., AT&T Mobility, and USA Mobility in negotiations with the hospital. T-Mobile USA Inc. is also in the works, pending the resolution of talks in congress concerning the proposed $39 billion buyout of the carrier by AT&T Inc.