From the classroom to the football stadium, JMA Wireless has your college covered
College campuses and universities present a unique set of challenges for network operators with capacity and coverage demands changing near daily as students pack lecture halls, hang out in dorm rooms or public spaces and descend on stadiums to cheer for the home team.
It’s vital that higher education institutions offer robust cellular and Wi-Fi coverage throughout the physical plant, while building a system that, in addition to providing dynamic resource allocation, is not only future-proof but cost-effective.
JMA Wireless is a leading global innovator in mobile wireless solutions equipped to enable a college campus to offer students, faculty and visitors a best-in-class wireless experience built on a modular, easy to optimize centralized architecture.
“There are days when all the students are on campus and in different buildings,” Todd Landry, JMA Wireless corporate vice president of Product and Market Strategy, told RCR Wireless News. “However, when a weekend game comes, all of a sudden there are 50,000 or 80,000 in a stadium.”
How do network operators support such dramatic swings in coverage and capacity needs? Landry pointed to JMA’s leading-edge Teko DAS (distributed antenna system) platform, which connects a centralized master unit with remote units to provide coverage anywhere, anytime.
The Teko Platform comprises a master unit that provides RF interface from BTS, NodeB or Donor signal sources and the optical interface for remote units for indoor or outdoor deployment; the system also contains a Multiband Spectrum Analyzer, which allows for monitoring and optimization.
“Instead of deploying individual systems,” Landry said, network operators can use a central DAS “to choose a location on the campus and put in all the head end gear, then, from that centralized location, they deliver coverage to the areas they want coverage in.”
He continued: “They can start with the most important areas and expand over time. They can start with two operators and add over time. They can take the capacity resources and they can shift them around,” based on changing network requirements.
The optional Multiband Spectrum Analyzer can be utilized by network managers to remotely monitor usage and interference to provide dynamic optimization of network resources.
The wide-variety of JMA Wireless remote units are easily incorporated into the campus-scape through sleek boxes that can be discretely mounted and easy to install antennas that can be hidden in lighting, for instance.
The remote units only require a single strand of fiber optic cable, which accommodates multiple carriers operating on multiple bands and meets an owner’s goal of minimizing capital costs.
“We can minimize the infrastructure requirements,” Landry said, “and [minimize] what your costs are as a result of that. That’s a key point: the ability to optimize fiber utilization.”
JMA Wireless provided the networking equipment that lights up Syracuse University’s 49,262-seat Carrier Dome. The deployment includes the centralized Teko DAS with 36 each six-band and four-band remote units supporting 700/AWS MIMO and AMP/PCS SISO services.
“If we didn’t offer them an alternative to our c-DAS approach,” Landry said, “They would have had to reconsider building out entirely new facilities on premise somehow. We were able to reduce the footprint on premise by 85%. We were able to bring all their carriers over a single fiber into that site and minimize the footprint.”
For more information, download JMA’s Education Solution Brief.
