Over the past five plus years I have been a strong advocate of separating out any WLAN or WMTS services from a DAS. This has been based not on my technical opinion but actual empirical testing results. While on the surface it may seem to be a strong marketing claim to provide WLAN services (data, voice) on a distributed antenna system, but also WMTS (Wireless Medical Telemetry Services), it has serious implications from both a CAPEX and OPEX, but more so from risk managment. First the cost factors for any type of diversity required for WMTS will require four times (4x) the amount of coaxial infrastructure to meet the signal level requirement for either 608-614MHz or 1.4GHz. Thus why the leading companies in this space pretty much have decided, well we have it,(the model) but wow the cost! In the case of 802.11a, this simply comes down to the link budget. To meet the link budget requirements for 802.11a on a DAS, you will need to provide active amplication both at the antenna element as well as in the IDF. This adds two critical components that could potentially fail. Most IT administrators will find the addition of these components is not acceptable. For at the end of the day, they will be required under pending IEC 80001 to provide a truly redundant mission critical medical grade network for healthcare data, voice, and medical device wireless devices.
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