ADC has announced that its FlexWave Prism outdoor distributed antenna system has been deployed at Michigan State University to support current mobile voice and data traffic and allow for an easy transition to LTE services support.

 

MSU’s 5,200-acre campus is one of the largest in the United States, and its 553 buildings host tens of thousands of people on a typical day and many more during events at the 75,005-seat Spartan Stadium.

 

The macro cell towers surround the edges of the campus. However, these towers do not provide adequate service for the dense user population, and they also do not penetrate campus facilities effectively.

 

Since 2004, the service providers enhancing their on-campus services at MSU have selected ADC’s outdoor DAS products for the purpose, including MetroPCS, Sprint, Nextel and Verizon.

 

Verizon Wireless replaced the existing ADC LRCS products with FlexWave Prism. ADC said that Prism accommodates multiple frequency bands or service providers and supports LTE upgrades in a single system.

 

“With the ability to cover up to four sectors with a single, compact antenna unit, FlexWave Prism is ideal for delivering high-bandwidth coverage to complex environments like the Michigan State campus,” said Tony LeFebvre, director of product management for outdoor DAS products at ADC.

 

LeFebvre said that service providers like Verizon are now realizing that Prism’s multi-band, multi-protocol flexibility also helps create an easy transition to 4G services because carriers simply plug a new module into an existing system and through software adjust the digital simulcast configuration to adapt to changing user patterns.

 

Similar to MSU’s previous DAS deployments, the latest project leverages a 60-mile existing fiber optic network owned by the university, said company officials. The recent FlexWave Prism deployment includes 15 mast- and building-mounted DAS remote units. Company officials said that the compact and low-power consuming remote units are deployed in rooftop mechanical equipment spaces on each building.

 

“Outdoor DAS is the most efficient way to cover buildings and outdoor spaces at a large and densely-populated campus like ours,” said Jeff Carpenter, planning and engineering supervisor for telecommunication systems at Michigan State University.

 

The University selected DAS because the products use a small amount of fiber, so it does not have to allocate a lot of dark fiber resources, and their electronics are also small and low-power, so it can easily accommodate discrete systems from multiple carriers in the limited equipment rooms, Carpenter said.