Have you ever been in an office building trying to use your cell phone or Blackberry and it is almost impossible because there is no signal? You end up leaning against the window in a conference room just to get a good signal. We have some clients in large office buildings who have this problem. You walk 10 feet away from the windows and you have nearly no signal at all. This was causing a lot of pain for users trying to use their phone or do email when away from their desk. Luckily there is a solution to the problem and after implementation, there are no more worries about having a weak signal.
The Story
Like I mentioned earlier, we have a client that needed to get better cell signals throughout their office space. They have about 10,000 square feet with a large part of the space away from the windows that had no signal at all. We found a cell repeater solution that allowed us to simply mount a window antenna on one end and an omnidirectional antenna about 50 feet away on the other end to boost/repeat the signal throughout the office. Since the equipment was pretty much plug and play we figured it would just take a couple of hours to get it all installed and working. Warning – It is not so simple and it ended up taking about 30 man hours trying to find the best placement for everything so it worked well and was hidden as much as possible. Once in place though the signal was great. In fact recently before the installation I sat in a meeting in one of their conference rooms and couldn’t get my PDA to sync my email since there was no signal at all. Now, oddly, it shows a slight signal but it works just fine (I did go in to the advanced diagnostics on my PDA and it shows a very good signal so who knows why the pretty little indicator on the main screen does not).
There are a lot of different types of cell repeaters on the market, so do a search and find the one that works best for your environment. For one of our clients, we chose a model from the firm Powerful Signal. Good price, good support, and it works well.
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