RoamBOOST has announced it will add Westell Technologies Inc. ClearLink® solutions to provide its in-building DAS (distributed antenna system) to the hospitality industry and other markets.
The new solution is notable as it solves a common but until now unresolved phenomenon known as the Near-Far Effect. This phenomenon can cause significant degradation in the performance of traditional solutions where data throughput can be reduced by up to 70 percent. Additionally, Near-Far can also impact public safety/first responder 700MHz and 800MHz performance within a building where traditional DASs are installed. The ClearLink DAS mitigates this problem with digital filtering.
Pam Angelucci, senior vice president of operations for RoamBOOST, summarized: “The problem is complicated but can be explained in a few steps:
- A building has an in-building DAS (iDAS) with some but not all network carriers participating in the DAS.
- A person in the building is using their mobile device on a carrier network that is not represented on the iDAS.
- The person’s device “powers up” dramatically to reach the carrier signal being transmitted from the outside source.
- The power up process causes the DAS to reduce its power to protect itself.
- This reduces the data throughput of the DAS.
- Traditional DASs also transmit broadband noise that raise the noise level for phones not on the DAS.
- Phones that are not on the DAS (e.g. Public Safety) experience degraded performance due to the elevated noise.
The iDAS essentially cannot perform optimally with strong signal interference and phones not on the DAS cannot operate optimally with the rise in noise and therefore performance degrades dramatically and quickly.”
The Westell solution being brought to market by RoamBOOST intelligently solves this issue.
