While I think that this is pretty interesting as the leading WLAN company decides to step into providing cellular and PCS provisioning inside a building, there are some questions that are posed? If you look at ADC (Previous LGC), providing this capability of CAT5 DAS this is nothing new. It is is somewhat new to converge this with WLAN. When you start converging services you have to look at the market direction, what is going on, and also…again, the pesky "link budget". Sorry to get technical, but the performance and cost, comes down to this. LGC now ADC is favored by the carriers because it is low cost and where ATT and Verizon desires a single carrier coverage they will provide. In other words the carrier will provide IF they can balance the economics of a contract, handsets, etc. That model is going away a bit in the enterprise space. However, that also has changed with the enterprise customer like healthcare. They do not want to be beholding to contracts with a single carrier, they want their in-building coverage to be agnostic. Hence, multi-carrier. So some questions that comes to mind are:
1. How will this solution provide multi-carrier coverage, i.e. ATT, Verizon, and Sprint/Nextel?
2. How will this support public safety frequencies at both the 800MHz and 700MHz? Specifically in 700Mhz the two narrowband segments 769-775MHz (Channels 1-960) for base operations and 799-805MHz (Channels 1-961-1920) for mobile operators. Each narrowband segment is divided into 960 channels with each channel having a size of 6.25kHz. Extensive public safety coverage is becoming mandated in many jurisdictions across the country.
3. How will this support the roll out of LTE at 700MHz by Verizon in over 25-30 markets in 2010 and to include provisioning for 700Mhz Public Safety (mentioned) as well as 800Mhz?
4. Does the MobileAccess VE solution and concept cause issue with any prevailing IP or patents in the industry? Just curious.
At the end of the day, novel solution. Needs to be closely evaluated for the in-building space.
