Wireless Connectivity in the Work Environment: Cellular DAS

Wireless Connectivity in the Work Environment: Cellular DAS

The younger work force is going to expect the businesses where they work to provide reliable indoor cellular coverage.

Additionally, there are other key drivers forcing enterprises to think about installing an in-building wireless solution: more businesses are implementing a bring your own device (BYOD) policy, requiring more bandwidth and frequencies; widespread use of smartphones and other wireless devices, both professionally and personally, to access important people and applications; and there is an increase in the development and usage of technologies supporting the Internet of Things (IoT).

 

A critical first step is assessing employee, tenant or guest connectivity needs, both what they are today and what they will be tomorrow. Understanding those requirements will help determine which in-building wireless solution is best, whether it is a simple repeater, voice over Wi-Fi, small cells or DAS. These solutions all have different costs associated with them, and while one may appear to be more attractive from a cost standpoint, if it fails to meet the use case requirements, then the money spent on it has essentially been thrown away.

 

Small cells and repeaters can be inexpensive and solve for some of the problems being experienced today. Each can provide a better indoor cellular signal. But, that is all they can do. However, a best-in-class distributed antenna system can solve for business’ current needs, and position them to take advantage of the technologies of tomorrow.

 

Enterprises charged with solving the indoor connectivity issue put much of the decision criteria solely on price. While price is always a factor, many business are not considering aspects beyond the main hardware costs. The reality is that hardware is often only half of the cost of a distributed antenna system. What is too often forgotten are the various components needed to get a DAS system set up and installed. 

 

There are three key total cost of ownership considerations when investigating which DAS solution is right for the businesses’ requirements.

 

1: The Cost of Cabling and Ancillary Hardware

The first consideration is the kind of cabling needed to operate the system. Most DAS providers boast that their system uses fiber cabling, but that doesn’t mean their system is fiber based. Many systems use fiber at some point, however, most use a hybrid cabling system.

This means even though some of the cabling is fiber, the vast majority of the system is based on coaxial cable. Why isn’t a hybrid system optimal? Anything that is not fiber based is more difficult to install, more intrusive to the business where it’s being deployed, and more expensive. Commonly, a hybrid system uses fiber cabling as the backbone, but it also uses coaxial cabling out to the antennas (the equipment that distributes the now-amplified cellular signal to be consumed by mobile devices). Depending on how the system is engineered, antenna points can be hard to access with coaxial cabling. Because heavier coaxial cabling is very difficult to manipulate, more cable is necessary, resulting in higher costs that might not have been initially considered.

 

The optimal DAS system, uses fiber cabling throughout the system all the way to the antennas. And, in many situations, an all-fiber DAS system can utilize the existing fiber infrastructure of a building. In addition to cabling, there is also ancillary equipment that may be needed but never accounted for in the initial hardware estimate. Often, the need for this equipment will not reveal itself until the engineering of the system is complete. It could be special hardware that wasn’t considered in the original pricing. Or, there may be a need for additional antennas due to the way a particular building is configured. These are all factors of the final cost, but they aren’t necessarily a part of the initial price quote.

 

2: The Cost of Installation

As previously noted, not only is coaxial cable more expensive, it is much harder to install.  It is not as flexible as fiber cabling, which may mean longer runs are needed to get from point A to point B. Longer runs require more man-hours to install. Additionally, a team of people will likely need to access ceilings, which adds even more installation time.

That means that not only is it more expensive for the cable, it’s also going to cost more to get the cabling installed. Coupled with employees being displaced while teams of installers work in the ceiling, businesses are also confronted with a loss of employee productivity that should be considered in the total cost.

 

Additionally, there is more to install than just cabling. There is also hardware to install, and the right DAS solution can help you keep those costs down. Businesses need a solution that isn’t complicated, has a limited number of components and can be easily engineered in a way to minimize expense. Otherwise, the installation of the hardware can become complicated, demanding more time and money than was initially quoted.

 

3: The Cost to Meet Future Connectivity Needs

The costs of 1 and 2 are required to install a system that meets the connectivity needs of a business today. But what about tomorrow? What kind of cellular connectivity will be needed a year from now? Two years or more?

Future needs are as important to consider as the indoor cellular connectivity needs of today. The pace of change in the wireless world is brisk. While a majority of commercial cellular customers are just now using 4G networks, the industry is already heavy into the development of 5G networks. Additionally, wireless carriers often add new frequencies to expand their network’s capacity.

 

All of this change is happening because smartphones have changed the way we communicate and the way we work. Smartphones aren’t just for phone calls. Now we use them, as well as tablets, for email, messaging, running applications, and more. All of that functionality requires reliable connectivity which needs to be factored into the solution criteria. The DAS solution that seems like a luxury today is really a necessity for any company that wants to support how its employees are communicating now, and also how they’ll be communicating in the very near future.

 

But it’s not just employees that will be communicating. The long-touted Internet of Things (IoT) is quickly becoming a reality, and much of the data that is going to be shared between devices and will travel over radio frequencies. The same is true for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications that will be needed to make manufacturing much more efficient. These are just a few of the applications, and there are others: location based services, industrial robots, and 5G cellular. As new wireless devices and applications are being adopted, all of them require a reliable indoor cellular signal.

 

It is critical for businesses to build a system that meets the connectivity needs of today, while thinking about what their connectivity demands will be tomorrow.  RF Freqs designs and installs systems needed today with the future in mind to expand and meet the wireless technologies quickly evolving.