Can you hear me now? – Sprint solves an inner-building cell coverage issue
Posted by James Spires
November 5th, 2009
We recently moved into a beautiful new LEEDS certified office space. One problem we quickly discovered – steel beam construction and high efficiency walls wreak havoc on our cell phone reception. Adding to this challenge is the fact that we are also located on the bottom floor of a three story building, so cell phone coverage in most of the inner office space was non-existent. This caused the obvious cell problems for staff – specifically the IT and support teams, whom provide 24×7 on-call support services for our vast client base.
After researching signal amplifiers we spoke to our local Sprint Rep. Al Johnson and asked about our options. Our challenge was to find a way to boost the cell phone signal from our carrier, Sprint, across an entire building. Talking with Al it became apparent that a string of low-end cell repeaters strewn through the office would not support the signal boost at the distances we needed to cover = roughly 27,000 sq ft.
Sprint’s solution was to install a set of commercial grade CDMA / IDEN signal boosters in our office with a set of cell repeater antennas on the roof of our facility. It took a couple technicians two days to complete the installation.
The system is comprised of three cone shaped, matte white, internal antennas that hang down a couple inches off the ceiling in various locations around our office. Two signal amplifier units are wall mounted in a back room (each roughly the size of a toaster oven). There are a pair of two inch thick antenna wires that run out through the building and up to the roof. This is some serious commercial grade cellular amplification.
Now that the system is installed an employee joked that they get 6 out of 5 bars on their Sprint phone. We now have full bars in every corner of the building.
This has proven to be a great solution, and Sprint’s support and responsiveness was impressive, so we thought we’d share it with you. Hats off to Al Johnson and the Sprint team that helped make this happen in short order.
and Yes, we can hear you now.
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Our perspectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.