It's not a courtesy to have ubiquitous, reliable, and high-performance indoor cellular service. These days, that's the way of doing business. With new use cases for mobile communications seemingly emerging, businesses continue to ramp up their use of cellular data, which promises improved business communications, increased employee productivity, and greater organizational efficiency than ever before.

However, achieving ubiquitous coverage indoors or on campus using traditional distributed antenna systems (DAS) is an expensive and time-consuming option that is only suitable for large enterprises. Nextivity's award-winning Cel-Fi cellular solutions provide enterprises with a lower-cost path to indoor cellular while reducing deployment challenges.

What drives the need for enterprises to focus themselves on indoor coverage? In short, it's the tension between the way business is done and the way mobile networks are built. While communications service providers (CSPs) have spent billions of dollars securing spectrum and building out their macro networks, many have had to pause or cancel indoor and small cell network buildouts.

In fact, in many cases, the onus for providing the service has shifted to the businesses themselves, said Stephen Kowal, Nextivity's chief commercial officer. In a recent chat with RCR Wireless editor-in-chief Sean Kinney, Kowal said ubiquitous mobile coverage is increasingly being viewed as a basic business utility, along with heat, water and electricity.

Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) provide performance and reliability for enterprise indoor cellular networks and are the de facto standard for large companies. But traditional DAS installations have significant drawbacks that can limit their deployment, scalability, and efficacy. DAS systems require companies to make significant capital and logistical commitments and timelines, which can wreak havoc on a business's bottom line, Kowal said.

"Traditional DAS systems require infrastructure and an ecosystem, which increases deployment cost and time. Most traditional DAS solutions require fiber backhaul and require base stations. Both of these add to installation costs," Kowal said.

Building a single source — or multiple sources, if the enterprise needs to support multiple carriers — presents another major challenge that could further hamstring the enterprise.

"Typically, network operators need to be involved in the discussion, which means multiple retransmission protocols," Kowal said.

It can take an enterprise 12 to 18 months to launch a DAS-based solution. That could leave businesses scrambling for coverage options or other temporary solutions, driving up costs and adding complexity. That leaves a big gap in the market, Kowal said.

"In desperation, many homeowners have turned to consumer-grade broadband repeaters, which have not worked well," he said. Capturing, amplifying, and distributing outdoor macro signals with these types of repeaters can interfere with carrier networks, potentially causing a host of problems. Nextivity's IntelliBoost processors provide complete transparency and seamless integration into carrier networks.

Simplified DAS

Nextivity's Cel-Fi QUATRA solution provides an alternative by combining the best of passive DAS technology with Nextivity's smart signaling technology. Cel-Fi QUATRA is an active DAS hybrid system that provides 3G, 4G and 5G voice and data capabilities. The system uses a class-cable architecture, with the network unit (NU) powering and transmitting signals to the coverage unit (CU) via Power over Ethernet (PoE), he said.

"That means we don't have signal fading issues with our coverage units," Kowal said. "All of these solutions are 100% cyber-secure and guaranteed to be noiseless."

The solution can be connected to small cells to help achieve uniform coverage and capacity allocation, or it can work completely offline. 5G and fiber extenders for larger campus deployments are also optional.

"All of these can be deployed in a matter of weeks," he said, compared with the months or more than a year required for traditional fiber-optic backhaul DAS solutions.

Deployment of Nextivity's Cel-Fi solution begins with the systems integrator, Kowal said. Integrators work with customers to understand their specific needs. Upon completion, existing campus coverage will be mapped. The integrator and Nextivity worked closely with the client to come up with a bill of materials that provided the required coverage.

"We do fieldwork. We take measurements and take pictures, we do fieldwork to determine what coverage is available. We start planning where that equipment goes."

Cabling, antenna and equipment configurations were mapped, and Nextivity's signal targeting tools helped optimize the installation's signal quality.

"It depends on how open the floor plan is, the type of walls used, and the size of the building. Now we look at the source: Where do we put the donor antenna? Where do we aim it? Or are we going to leverage small cells," he asked road.

"We're able to set it up, diagnose it, and then ultimately manage it long-term," Kowal said.

The goal is to work with system integrators and customers to create a consistent and repeatable process that can be replicated across multiple enterprise campuses to help speed up deployment, he said.

For customers with larger campuses and deployments, Nextivity's Cel-Fi QUATRA product offers some flexibility, especially when network elements and coverage elements need to be more than 100 meters from each other, Kowal said. One option is the Cel-Fi QUATRA Range Extender, which doubles the distance to 200 meters using traditional copper cables.

"Our latest component, the Cel-Fi QUATRA fiber optic range extender, can extend the range up to two kilometers," he said. "It's a game changer for us."

Cel-Fi QUATRA offers a modular design and future-proof scalability as your business grows. "With this solution, integrators can be as big or small as needed," he said.

Nextivity's current focus is on "middle-tier" clients -- 100-500,000 square feet of commercial real estate.

“We can handle large open spaces such as warehouses, data centers, manufacturing or large retail stores. These are normal installations for us,” Kowal said. Schools, hospitals and medical centers provide another growing market for Nextivity, he added.

“Awareness and demand for indoor cellular networks is at an all-time high right now. It’s really no surprise when you see the expansion of 5G and 5G cellular hardware,” Kowal said.

Kowal said Cel-Fi QUATRA provides a way for enterprises to equip their facilities with end-to-end coverage more easily than ever before and integrate more easily into existing IT workflows.

“Today they still rely on an integrator to install it, but that looks more like a traditional IT integrator than a special RF integrator. By making these solutions look more similar, it makes the solution The program feels more comfortable," he said.