College of Engineering Pilot
The College of Engineering Pilot is described in the Campus Cellular Telephone Access Project Executive Summary. It is a technical trial of a new indoor Distributed Antenna System (DAS) which uses the heating and cooling supply ducts as a waveguide for the cellular frequency distribution. The trial is underway, and is expected to be in place through at least July 2009. Project updates and the results of the pilot will be posted here.
Updates
June 25, 2009
AT&T has been making significant changes in their local outdoor infrastructure in Ann Arbor that caused intermittent service problems for persons in the area using AT&T. AT&T users in the trial buildings attributed all the problems to the trial infrastructure. To stabilize the in-building system, CoE personnel were informed that the AT&T service was turned down in the trial buildings until the outdoor upgrades as well as tuning the in-building system could be completed. There are interference issues with the AT&T and Verizon signal within the trial locations. Equipment to segregate the 850 and 1900 MHz bands on different probes (antennas) in the HVAC system has been ordered and will be installed by July 2. The week of July 6 we will optimize all carriers with the new equipment. We anticipate this will take 2-3 days. During this time, the in-building system will not be functioning, so users will experience the level of coverage available prior to the installation of in-building equipment. Feedback has shown us that users have come to expect and use the increased in-building coverage in the pilot locations. Although still a pilot, we have asked the vendor to provide production-level communication to us so that we may let users know what they may expect for service quality when we are working on the system.
April 20, 2009
Duderstadt and CSE are up and working. There are some optimization challenges that are being investigated. The problems are either related to having an outdoor donor antenna vs. the preferred, permanent BTS or they are problems that would occur with any indoor DAS. It appears that none of the optimization challenges are specific to the HVAC-based DAS. EECS, Dow, and Brown expected to be turned on the week of April 27. Performance and quality data is being collected from all locations.
April 6, 2009
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