Ever been to a sports game and tried to send a text message, upload a photo to Facebook, or send a tweet about that awesome play that just happened? If so, you may have been left frustrated by the overcrowded network that prevented that all-important message from making your friends jealous.
TD Garden (Source: Google Maps)
AT&T is looking to address the challenge of high-density cell use areas by installing Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) at stadiums and other places where crowds congregate frequently, such as airports, hotels, casinos, and conventions centers. The latest installation: at TD Garden in Boston, where the Boston Bruins and Boston Celtics play.
"We literally take what would be at the base of a cell tower, three big antennas covering a radius around the stadium, and we shrink that down with lower-powered antennas to a section in the park of a couple of hundred yards, turning it into little cell sites sitting side by side by side," said Chad Townes, AT&T vice president of the antenna solutions group. As a result, Facebook will be updated, tweets will be sent out and text messages will flow.
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The basic idea is to break up the service into smaller bite-sized chunks that are easier for the network to handle. The DAS works by splitting the area that needs additional coverage into multiple zones, ranging from a dozen up to multiple dozens, depending on the density of the population. Each section then gets its own antenna, which is tied into a base station radio that generates 3G and 4G frequencies. A handful of antennas are connected and share an Ethernet connection into the AT&T core network. "It's the same thing as an antenna on the top of a tower, just on a smaller scale," Townes says. By using more than a dozen individual antennas around the stadium, it prevents the 3G and 4G traffic clogging up a local cell antenna.
The DAS is also a neutral host system so the antennas around the stadiums can handle frequencies from a variety of carriers. So, if for example Verizon was interested in plugging into the system, the company would only need to install a base station to generate the radio frequencies to send out to customers and pay AT&T a royalty fee for using the core fiber piping. "If we have a lot of customers in one place all the time, it makes a lot of sense," Townes says.
AT&T has already launched DAS at the Superdome in New Orleans, Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis (host of the most recent Super Bowl), and, of course, at AT&T park in San Francisco, home of the San Francisco Giants baseball team. A similar architecture can be used in an office building setting, for example, creating a single antenna that covers two or three floors of a building.
Other venues have brought high-tech accessories to the sports stadium, such as T-Mobile Renting Tablets at the Angels venue in Los Angeles, and the University of Phoenix beefed up its wireless when it hosted the Super Bowl.
(courtesy:pcworld.com)
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