SOLiD’s GENESIS DAS: An enterprise-friendly approach to in-building wireless
The vast majority of mobile data usage comes from inside buildings as enterprises increasingly depend on smartphones and tablets to get the job done. Despite this trend, there’s a huge, underserved commercial building market–office buildings, retail spaces, residential high rises and industrial complexes–that don’t have strong, reliable in-building cellular access. Distributed antenna system (DAS) vendors are working to make solutions that take cost and complexity out of in-building to better serve enterprise buyers.
SOLiD defines this space–commercial buildings between 100,00-square-feet and 500,000-square-feet–as the middleprise. With its new GENSIS DAS solution, announced during Mobile World Congress 2018, SOLiD has used a four-pronged approach to address enterprise in-building needs.
- Industry-standard structured cabling to lower installation costs and eliminate issues related to passive interference modulation (PIM);
- Upgradable low power remote units support four or six band configurations, as well as SISO and MIMO, on multimode or single mode fiber;
- Support for low-, medium- and high-power nodes allow RF engineers to design and deploy a flexible, customized system;
- And integrated web management and SNMP support to feed other monitoring systems.
SOLiD President Ken Sandfeld called the GENSIS DAS “a middleprise game-changer from an infrastructure standpoint. It allows the middleprise to be able to use structured cabling solutions versus coax. One of the big draws is the ability to use cat cables and fiber cables versus the coax, which lowers your installation costs and, most importantly, it makes it a much more friendly solution for an enterprise to deploy.”
Click here to watch an interview with Sandfeld from Mobile World Congress.
The GENESIS DAS is an out-of-the-box solution tailored to the enterprise that’s 5G-ready and is backwards compatible with previous-generation SOLiD equipment. In terms of signal source, it integrates with the GENSIS RAX solution, which is a virtualized multi-operator radio access network to provide on-demand coverage and capacity at a lower price point.
Iain Gillott, president and founder of iGR, said, “The in-building marketplace is vibrant and growing based on the expectation of enterprises, building owners, and tenants. In-building solutions need to offer upgradeability, investment protection, and customizable configurations to address this market opportunity successfully.”
In another move to better address the needs of enterprise stakeholders, earlier this year SOLiD partnered with Cheytec, a company formed to focus exclusively on enterprise in-building wireless. Cheytec has unique distribution agreements with radio vendors Ericsson and Nokia, as well as its partnership with SOLiD. Sandfeld said the partnership will help speed delivery of DAS equipment to enterprise customers looking to quickly solve indoor coverage problems.
Sandfeld said, when it comes to enterprise DAS, it all comes down to cost. “Ultimately, if you take the cost of a DAS system today–fiber, coax, and all the deployment, PIM management and all those coax-type things you have to deal with–…[the goal is] to reduce the overall cost of the solution and make it easier for an enterprise to deploy. They’re still going to be working with an integrator that’s trained in DAS solutions to design it and put it together, but…they can deploy their own cabling teams to cable the building.”
He said the GENESIS DAS is “Wi-Fi-like” and “enterprise-friendly. It’s something they can get an ROI out of by deploying additional infrastructure versus the coax where it’s a single-purpose architecture.”
