Wireless and Building Coverage

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Wireless and Building Coverage [Copy link]

With mobile phone service now available in 210 countries and mobile networks covering many major cities, one might think that rural areas would be the first choice for further wireless network expansion.
But this view is wrong. In fact, the need for high-quality wireless coverage is even more urgent in urban homes, or in all urban buildings.

Today, there are more mobile phone users than landline users worldwide. In developing countries, mobile phones are often users' first phone, while in developed countries, the growth in the number of consumer and business users is also making mobile phones their preferred communication tool.

In other words, people want mobile phones to communicate everywhere - indoors, in offices, buildings, hotels, conference centers, and subways. However, mobile base stations located outdoors cannot provide good coverage indoors or in buildings. Office buildings are often equipped with steel windows, heat-insulating windows, and other building materials that may weaken wireless signals; while family homes may be shielded from wireless signals because they are built on hillsides or blocked by trees. In addition, high-speed services such as video streaming and game downloads require better wireless transmission, and even in buildings with acceptable voice service coverage, data service quality may be unacceptable.

The networking industry is meeting these challenges in a variety of ways. For example, companies such as ADC, Andrew, Comba Telecom, Dekolink, and LGC Wireless are currently using repeaters and distributed antennas to provide good indoor coverage for medium and large buildings.

Nextel has been actively enabling enterprise users to use its mobile phone indoor coverage services, and its push-to-talk and trunking calling features are particularly suitable for enterprise users.

In addition, the WLAN and mobile phone industries are joining forces to solve the problem of in-building coverage. WLAN vendors are adding VoIP capabilities to their products, while mobile phone vendors are adding Wi-Fi capabilities to their phones. Mobile phone infrastructure vendors are developing solutions that can carry voice calls and data sessions between mobile phone networks and WLANs.

Ensuring mobile phone coverage indoors and in buildings is the only challenge. WLAN is effective when high-speed Internet connections are shared indoors, and the coverage quality is also very good. Some manufacturers are also developing picocell base stations for indoor use, but these base stations are expensive. Another solution is to use low-cost repeaters, but this approach can only work in close cooperation with mobile phone operators because the licensed frequency bands they use are reusable.

People spend a large portion of their day inside buildings. So it's no surprise that consumers and business users alike are eager for seamless wireless voice and data coverage, both indoors and outdoors. Unfortunately, it will take quite some time for this to be fully realized.