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The City of Bellevue is the state of Washington’s fifth largest city, with a population of more than 130,000. Home to Microsoft and other high-tech corporations, the City prides itself on having up-to-date city services and technology in its public facilities. One example is its 650,000-square foot City Hall complex, which includes office space for some 900 employees and an attached parking structure. When an older DAS that had been previously deployed failed to support commercial cellular service, the City switched to a Zinwave system that now meets all of its needs and will support expansion well into the future.
The City took over an existing building in 2005 as the site of its new City Hall. As part of the retrofitting process, the City had a DAS installed in order to comply with International Fire Code regulations mandating that a radio coverage system be provided in public buildings. Designed to support just two frequencies, it didn’t provide strong public safety coverage in the basement and other below-grade levels of the building, nor in most of the parking garage, and it supported only one band of commercial cellular traffic in only parts of the building. When the carrier phased out the supported cellular frequency after a few years, the building’s workers were left without cellular coverage in the hard to reach places.
Seeking a Solution
In bringing the system up to date, the City had four key goals:
NEMA 4 enclosure
Working with a local consultant, the City put together a Request for Proposal and sent it to all major distributed wireless system providers. The City selected Zinwave’s UNItivity distributed wireless platform for its new wireless communications infrastructure because Zinwave’s solution could support any radio frequency the city used or planned to use in a single system, and it does so without the need to add expensive equipment upgrades.
“Providing public safety radio and cellular services throughout the building by leveraging our existing fiber-optic investments and getting away from the traditional coax-based DAS was important to us,” said Jim Rawley, Network Systems and Security Lead in the IT Department for the City of Bellevue. “Safety for staff, security and innovation are paramount. We are always looking for ways to improve performance and reliability.”
Deploying the Zinwave Solution
Inside the NEMA 4 enclosure with Zinwave primary hub
Zinwave’s wideband distributed wireless platform was deployed with one primary hub, six secondary hubs, and 44 remote amplifier units. It supports frequencies from 150 to 2700 MHz, so it easily handled the City’s public safety and commercial cellular traffic. The City installed Zinwave’s wideband platform without disruption to the existing Public Safety First Responder Radio solution in the building, and added support for Verizon wireless, the carrier used by most of the City’s police, fire, and other personnel.
In addition to supporting all anticipated radio frequencies, Zinwave’s system was much easier and more cost-effective to install because it uses an all-fiber design that allowed the City to use existing structured cabling. The all-fiber system was easy to deploy within the City’s existing conduit, and because it uses fiber all the way from the hubs to the remote amplifier units, it provides a robust broadband transport which delivers maximum output power uniformly to every antenna for excellent quality of service.
Results
ADRF Repeater, Verizon Quad Band signal
Once the installation was complete, the City easily migrated 800 MHz public safety frequencies from the legacy solution to Zinwave’s wideband DAS platform without service interruption for mission-critical first responder radio service. Next, the City worked with Verizon Wireless to integrate their networks in the 700 MHz (LTE), 850 MHz (Cellular), 1900 MHz (PCS), and 2100 MHz (AWS) bands into the Zinwave wideband DAS platform. These new services were integrated into the Zinwave system by simply “plugging” them into the Zinwave Primary Hub – there was no new Zinwave DAS hardware required to support the integration of Verizon Wireless into the system. If the City decides to integrate additional mobile network operators, Zinwave’s wideband platform will be ready.
Rear view of ADRF repeater
“For the EMS radio frequency, we’re covering areas we never have before, which gives us a lot of peace of mind given today’s security concerns. We also provided increased cell coverage and got many thanks from people in the lower levels of the building who had never had cellular coverage before.” said Rawley.
With Zinwave, the City of Bellevue has enhanced its reputation as a technically savvy municipality by deploying a robust, future-proof wireless communication infrastructure in its City Hall. In fact, the City recently won an award from the Public Technology Institute for its deployment of the Zinwave DAS.
Challenges
Solution
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