High-Power Nodes Promote ‘Inside-Out’ DAS Coverage

May 23, 2012

While other DAS systems have been designed for outdoor spaces, Solid Technologies’ wireless systems have been hard at work in buildings serving verticals, such as the health care and hospitality industries and serving public safety in large venues. But that is changing. The line dividing in-building wireless and outdoor DAS is blurring, and that calls for higher power DAS units that integrate with in-building systems.

“In the past there has been this premise that you can build an outdoor DAS and blast the signal inside of buildings and then augment the areas that appear to be underserved among third-party DAS owner or operators,” Seth Buechley told DAS Bulletin at the International Wireless CTIA 2012. “The outdoor-in philosophy, I think, is proving thin.”

To wit, Solid has introduced the Titan 5 watt and 20 watt remote DAS units to provide expanded coverage area and capacity both inside and outside of buildings. Titan integrates with the Solid Alliance multi-operator and Express single-operator head-ends.

“What we find is that the end users themselves have an immediate in-building need that often drives the whole discussion,” Buechley said. “If there is a way to solve their in-building need and then leverage that investment toward covering some of their outdoor challenges, that is a win.”

Titan allows Solid to play in the expanded outdoor coverage space, parking lots, stadiums and subways, Buechley said. “Throughout a campus where you can have a common head end that serves both the indoor and outdoor nodes under a common management system,” he said.

Buechley said Titan serves as an intermediate step toward the goal of heterogeneous networks.

“Macro cellular networks, indoor wireless networks and everything in between — eventually they all need to be using the same network intelligence,” Buechley said. The industry is waiting for the Ericssons, Alcatels the NSNs of the world to a leadership role before it will happen. The gap between indoor wireless and macrocellular needs to be bridged through heterogeneous networks.”

The Titan product line closes that gap a little bit, because it employs outdoor nodes that are part of the same network management platform as Solid’s indoor multi-carrier products. Operators will be able to deploy an indoor system that will be able to drive elements that are located outside, allowing greater QOS management insight.

“Everything has to be one system, eventually,” Buechley said. “Between now and the time when small cell heterogeneous architecture become a reality, we will have iterative steps. Our Titan product line is one of those iterative steps.”