Extending high-performance cellular coverage indoors helps organizations improve safety and user experience for employees and customers
From offices to manufacturing plants to transport hubs, many enterprise environments are little more than lightly furnished Faraday cages. Built with wiring, rebar, and metal beams in walls, these buildings tend to block radio frequency signals from getting through, creating an enclosure nearly impossible for cellular signals to penetrate. So, how can employees and customers break out of these connectionless cages? A neutral host network.
What is a neutral host network?
Can you hear me now? Data — and likely your own experience — indicate that most employees and guests don’t get great coverage inside business and public sector buildings, creating safety and communication issues that are hazardous for people and operations. This approach — known as a neutral host network for coverage extension — extends coverage inside a building from public carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon.
Types of neutral host networks include multi-operator radio access network (MORAN) and multi-operator core network (MOCN). In a MOCN, all involved carriers share the same baseband hardware and cellular spectrum, which costs less but gives the carriers very little control over quality of experience. A MORAN separates the infrastructure and spectrum, which requires more infrastructure, but the carriers have much greater ability to fine-tune network performance.
Traditionally, in-building coverage has been improved and extended through a distributed antenna system (DAS). However, DAS is a legacy architecture that doesn’t scale very well and can be cost-prohibitive, mostly because it requires a lot of hardware, cabling, and power.
There’s an easier, more future-proof way to extend excellent coverage from all three major U.S. carriers further into a building. A small cell neutral host solution like Ericsson Enterprise 5G Coverage which leverages Ericsson Radio Dots, enables organizations to set up a scalable neutral host network with much less infrastructure and better performance.
Visit our Ericsson Enterprise 5G Coverage webpage to explore the value of small cell neutral host networks for extending and improving indoor cellular coverage.
Benefits of a small cell neutral host network solution
Additional advantage of a small cell neutral host network include:
- Shared infrastructure which utilizes up to 80% less footprint, significantly reducing the cost of deploying and maintaining separate wireless networks and Radio Dot Systems in the same location.
- Provisioning strong and consistent coverage inside buildings to ultimately boost property value and tenant or employee satisfaction.
- Simplified scalability as users, networks, and operations grow, particularly with 5G and future technologies in mind.
- Up to 70% less energy consumption and twice as fast to deploy than DAS solutions.
A neutral host network leveraging small cell radios is a highly efficient, scalable, and future-proof solution for providing reliable wireless coverage indoors. By enabling multiple carriers to share the same infrastructure, neutral hosts can dramatically reduce capital expenditures (CapEx), improve service quality, and simplify network management.
But how? For one thing, a small cell neutral host network utilizes MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output) to increase throughput and reliability. The process of converting DAS from SISO (Single Input, Single Output) to MIMO requires extensive infrastructure additions, which drives up CapEx costs.
What neutral host networks look like in practice
Modern, streamlined neutral host networks have significant value to businesses in virtually any and every industry. For example, commercial real estate companies can provide exceptional value to their tenants by choosing a DAS alternative that will be relevant and scalable for many years. In the same vein, higher education entities can boost coverage in campus buildings that have notoriously poor coverage. Hospitals. Hotels and convention centers. If it’s an indoor space where people need cellular access — basically, everywhere — then neutral host is a viable option to consider.
Think about factories. Many are upsizing, with some large factories — such as automobile or airline manufacturing plants — as expansive as 70 million square feet. In an increasingly litigious society, if public cell service is inadequate in a space that size, it can create safety risks that building owners are liable for. If someone on the factory floor is injured or a natural disaster occurs, employees may be unable to phone for help. Or, in the case of an active shooter or fire, a landline may not always be accessible, emphasizing the need for reliable cell coverage.
Radio Dots for a neutral host solution can be placed throughout the indoor factory environment to enable improved voice and data coverage for personal devices, keeping visitors and employees connected in all scenarios. As a bonus, this also helps meet high-capacity demands and supports low-latency 5G use cases. For example, in Columbus, Indiana, Toyota Material Handling integrated a Radio Dot System through a single neutral host and private 5G network provider, boosting network reliability and security in an almost 200,000-square-foot warehouse while extending coverage into buildings across a major production complex using the same Radio Dot System.
Getting started with a small cell neutral host network
If a 5G or LTE neutral host solution seems enticing, there are just a few more things to remember before mapping out an indoor coverage extension plan.
- Coverage extension is enabled through the Ericsson Radio Dot System.
- A subscription-based enterprise 5G coverage solution is turn-key for the facility owner because it is managed through a single provider such as Ericsson.
- An ideal neutral host provider offers a scalable solution that allows enterprises to expand their connectivity with a private cellular network and/or multiple carriers.
