When was the last time you had no service?
While most would expect to have low service during a walk along a remote coastline, fewer would expect to lack connectivity in a town or a city centre building, yet the latter is far more likely.
A useful example used to highlight the challenges of indoor connectivity is in hospital buildings. During the pandemic, the lack of connectivity in hospital buildings was brought to light when friends and family, unable to visit loved ones in person, depended on phone calls to stay in touch.
The reason for the lack of connectivity is the buildings themselves; many hospital buildings are old and built to last using dense materials that disrupt mobile phone signal. One study in 2024 reported that 43% of NHS buildings were built before 1985 and approximately 15% were built before the NHS was founded in 1948 (source). Since the first 1G mobile network wasn’t launched in the UK until the mid-1980s, it’s understandable that hospital buildings aren’t equipped for our modern connectivity expectations.
And it’s not just hospitals that are affected by poor indoor connectivity. Visitors to concert or football stadiums, transport hubs, shopping centres and even those working in offices are all impacted by poor connectivity due to the structure of the buildings they’re in.
Improving indoor connectivity can be complicated, so it's essential to measure the performance of a network throughout the building to identify areas of good, low or no coverage. Analysing these surveys identifies the sites where a signal booster device would have the greatest impact and allows teams to evaluate this impact post-deployment to determine the ROI.
Fortunately, significant progress has been made since the pandemic to improve indoor connectivity in hospitals and a wide variety of other buildings. Our in-building testing team have been busier than ever this year, testing buildings in cities across England, Scotland and Wales to support the deployment of DAS and small cell systems.
Following an in-building test, our engineers produce validated, floorplan-based designs including bills of materials, antenna plans and predicted performance. After deployment, our post-integration validation process verifies coverage and handover performance using a mix of scanner-based measurements and active device testing. The result is a turnkey testing service providing data-driven insights into network performance and useful recommendations for improving indoor network connectivity.
Contact a member of our team today for more information on our in-building RF survey and design service or visit our in-building survey and design webpage for more information.
