Breaking Down the Walls:
Wireless carriers extend and improve coverage
By Jim Ross
Wireless carriers are always looking to improve and extend their coverage for their consumers. But these days, traditional antennas and outdoor cell towers aren’t enough. Carriers are depending on new technology—Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS), picocells and femtocells, for example—to help solve sticky problems, such as how to strengthen indoor coverage. This is important, especially as users increasingly demand data and other services from their wireless phones.
As subscriber demand continues to grow, how can wireless carriers deploy the infrastructure to support these new services and, at the same time, improve their coverage? The good news is that “the technology is here now,” according to Manish Singh, Vice-President of Product Line Management for Continuous Computing in San Diego, Calif.
The tricky part is getting the technology rolled out in an efficient and affordable way and resolving the usual issues of security and establishing universal standards.
Evaluating options
Have you ever seen a neighbor talking outside on a cell phone? Is he just more comfortable in the yard? Perhaps. But he also might have trouble getting a good cell signal inside his house. Office workers face the same issues. Proximity to a cell site and other factors dictate whether we get full-bar service— or something less than that—when inside.
It’s highly improbable that people will give up on wireless communication because of these occasional glitches. Still, if consumers have bad experiences with their wireless—or at least fear the prospect of trouble—they will use their landlines when inside. According to some, this is still a factor in consumers’ mindsets, despite federal statistics showing about 16 percent of American households are “cord-free,” and another 13 percent are classified as nearly wireless-exclusive. The result, some say, is that wireless carriers essentially are leaving money on the table.
“Simply put, (wireless) carriers lose revenue as mobile minutes are lost to landline minutes when consumers experience dropped calls, poor quality of voice, and lower data rates when indoors,” Singh wrote in a recent article for Wireless Design & Development magazine. He expanded on those thoughts during a telephone interview with Wireless Wave.
