From hospitals and college campuses to venues and commercial real estate, investment in in-building wireless connectivity solutions is on an uptick. In-building wireless solutions enable myriad business-critical services including uninterrupted access to cloud applications, workforce mobility, and, in the case of hospitals, coordination that could mean life or death.
To address this need, vendors are working with carriers and hospitals to understand coverage and capacity needs to inform deployments. Let’s take a look at three case studies involving the use of distributed antenna systems (DASs) to solve for in-building connectivity at hospitals.
At a seven-floor hospital in Ohio, Comba Telecom worked with building owners to address problems with the current DAS, which provided bad to no signal, and was heavily impacted by medical devices. The hospital needed to support multiple carriers using multiple frequency bands.
Comba recommended an active off-air DAS with remote units on each floor of the hospital to provide cellular, PCS and LTE services.
At another U.S. hospital, Dali Wireless worked to support the needs of more than 400 physicians attending to some 200,000 annual patient visits. According to Dali, “This has become extremely important to the hospital as their physicians depend on their mobile devices for real-time access to laboratory results and patient information while their patients require reliable connection for video chats and calls to stay connected to family and friends.”
To meet those needs, as well as the hospital’s desire to invest in a multi-carrier, future proof solution, Dali installed its multi-operator RF Router to spread 3G and LTE signal through off-air repeaters and an eNodeB base station. The signals go through Dali’s tHost, which transported signal to 12 remote units using one fiber. The resulting coverage area totaled four floors and 300,000 square feet.
Physicians, clinical and administrative staff demanded wireless coverage throughout facility for cellular voice, data and healthcare applications to support delivery of high-quality patient care services.
At the Athens Regional Medical Center, Connectivity Wireless needed to cover multiple buildings totalling 500,000 square feet, and support three carriers.
“Physicians, clinical and administrative staff demanded wireless coverage throughout facility for cellular voice, data and healthcare applications to support delivery of high-quality patient care services,” according to Connectivity Wireless.
Using its DAS solution, Connectivity was able to provide service to the main hospital, the emergency room, and even the parking structure with a five-month deployment time.
