As public safety communications needs evolve, Nextivity continues to round out its product portfolio to meet them.
Nextivity veteran Michiel Lotter has recently taken over the role of CEO, after serving as CTO and VP of engineering and leading the development of the company’s Cel-Fi product line. In an interview with RCR Wireless News, he broke down Nextivity’s most recent product announcements from this year’s IWCE conference.
“Our goal with Nextivity moving forward is to truly be a complete, end-to-end supplier of everything that you need to solve all of the issues around in-building coverage, including on the public safety side,” Lotter said.
At IWCE, Nextivity debuted additional range-extending capabilities for its existing Cel-Fi QUATRA RED solution and also introduced its new Cel-Fi SOLO RED, a half-watt BDA in-building solution for public safety communications coverage.
“The half-watt is extremely important, because more and more buildings have to comply with the requirement to have great in-building public safety coverage,” Lotter explained. “We are seeing this requirement being pushed down onto buildings that are a little bit smaller than what you would traditionally have. As the building sizes become smaller, we need a more cost-effective solution to be able to address the in-building requirements for public safety, and this is really where the half-watt comes in.”
The SOLO RED solution can provide robust indoor coverage in buildings up to around 200,000 to 250,000 square feet, he says.
Meanwhile, Nextivity is also bolstering the capabilities of QUATRA RED to cover even more ground, with a new Fiber Range Extender for the product that enables the QUATRA RED coverage unit to be placed up to 1.5 km away from the network unit and connected via fiber. Lotter says that this enables QUATRA RED to be used for high-rise buildings and also for campus environments, with the ability to place up to 6 coverage units in separate buildings and then connected to the main network unit.
Both the SOLO RED and QUATRA RED solutions carry Nextivity’s longstanding “no noise” guarantee for operations. The desire for “no noise” boosters that do not interfere with network communications is important in commercial networks, but for public safety, it can be a matter of life or death, Lotter points out. Nextivity, which has its equipment operating in more than 200 mobile networks around the world, has brought its expertise in this area into its public safety products.
“We have really refined all the technology that’s needed to make sure the network is never harmed. When we took these first steps into public safety, we actually brought this technology that’s been hardened over the last 10-plus years, and we’ve pulled that into the public safety side of things,” Lotter says, going on to add, “For us, this is something that is truly part of our DNA, something that we take very seriously. And we’ve taken all of this learning and put that into our SOLO RED product line as well as our QUATRA RED product line.”
Watch the full interview with Lotter below. For more information about Nextivity’s SOLO RED and QUATRA RED products, including the Fiber Range Extender, go to: https://www.cel-fi.com/solutions/public-safety/
