Maintaining Coverage, Capacity and Performance at
Special Event Sites
The Situation
People gather in public venues for sporting events, concerts, races, festivals, demonstrations, celebrations, and even in emergency situations. With wireless penetration at over 90% in the United States, chances are good that almost everyone at these events has a cell phone. Often the circumstances are special enough that they will be using their phone not just to make phone calls but also to email pictures, text friends, and surf the internet. This leads to a concentrated volume of voice and data traffic, in an unpredictable environment with no history to help design an appropriate level of wireless network support.
Wireless carriers often deal with this challenging situation by deploying CoW/CoLT or Distributed Antenna System (DAS) equipment. With these temporary deployments the ability to efficiently address interference is very limited due to the short time available to deploy and the urgency with which service must be provided. It's exacerbated by the high visibility that typically accompanies these types of events.
The Resolution
One example of a special event application occurred when ISCO provided several spectrum conditioning units for use with a carrier's Distributed Antenna System at the Super Bowl. The carrier needed to install a system of antennas at the field that could accommodate increased wireless traffic there. The antenna system, which included 9 ISCO spectrum conditioning units, was designed to enhance coverage in areas where factors such as terrain, building construction and crowds can lead to dropped calls and inconsistent service.
Infrastructure Details
ISCO's Adaptive Interference Mitigation (AIM) products eliminate the corruption caused by narrow band interference, passing an RF signal free of co-channel, in-band interference. ISCO's AIM products immediately remove interference as it appears, without requiring the carrier to predict its timing and location. This ensures cell sites can react very quickly to all possible sources of RF power that may interfere with cellular transmissions during a special event or critical emergency response deployment, resulting in increased coverage, capacity and performance.