What is the Difference Between Coverage and Capacity?

Video Description

In a world of cellular service and the distributed antenna systems or DAS that deliver signals indoors, there is a persistent talk track around the topic of coverage versus capacity and who needs what solution. The question usually comes up when calls, texts, or other data won't go through. The reality is ninety percent of the time, it's not a busy network, but rather: you aren't really connected at all. You have no cellular coverage. This is especially true if you're indoors. This is good news because it costs a lot more to add capacity than it does to fix coverage. Luckily, there is Nextivity. We are DAS cellular coverage experts dedicated to delivering high quality signals to every part of an indoor space. Let's look at the difference between cellular signal coverage and capacity issues in more detail. Network capacity refers to the network's ability to handle a lot of requests, send a lot of data, and or manage a lot of users. Over the years, network operators across the globe have spent billions and billions of dollars updating their network quality and capacity to ensure a good user experience for their subscribers. The macro public network has a tremendous amount of capacity built into it. That said, there are times when a portion of the network or a particular cell needs added capacity. An example is a Swaler TIFF concert where you might have one hundred thousand people simultaneously live streaming their experience to friends without tickets. This is a capacity issue, and the fix is a legacy DAS that adds capacity and ensures coverage across the stadium, allowing all that data to go through. Airports or a high-use office skyscraper are other places we might see capacity issues. A legacy DAS system is very expensive, from hundreds of thousands of dollars to more than a million dollars, depending on requirements. It will also likely take more than a year to deploy, due to carrier coordination and the need for dedicated fiber backhaul. The other ninety percent of cellular issues are coverage issues. Simply put, the robust signal put out by network operators is not reaching the cellular device. There are a lot of reasons cellular signals don't make it from outside a building to inside a building. Often, it's the building itself. Both modern buildings and natural materials block, absorb, and reflect signals. And the higher the frequency of the signal, like 5G, the less likely it is to pass through walls, coated glass, and furnishings. This is what Nextivity coverage solutions do. They bring the power and capacity of the macro network inside buildings. Now is probably a good time to talk about bars: the kind on your phone, not the ones with happy hours. The bars on your cellular device indicate signal strength. In general, more bars typically translate into better signal. However, there are a lot of factors that can affect your device's ability to have calls or data get through. Factored into bars are signal quality indicators. For acronym lovers, there is SINAR, the signal to interference plus noise ratio: SINAR measures the strength of the desired signal versus unwanted noise and interference. Too much noise, even if the signal is strong, will degrade performance. Cellular devices are constantly communicating with towers in the cellular network thousands of times a minute. The bars on your phone don't adjust that fast or that often. So while more bars are good, they aren't a guarantee of great service with all that's going on behind the scenes. When Nextivity talks about raising the bar and our installers being certified bar raisers, we are talking about delivering more bars to more places. In other words, covering an indoor space with a strong, high quality cellular signal. Our signal is high quality because we have intelligent algorithms that clean up the signal before we distribute it throughout a building. This is in stark contrast to dumb repeaters that amplify and distribute both signal and noise. Our signal processing algorithms are one of the main things that make Nextivity solutions smarter by design. So in the great debate over capacity versus coverage, just remember that ninety percent of indoor cellular issues are coverage issues. So why not start with a coverage specialist like Nextivity? There is no reason to pay for added capacity where and when it's not needed. If we figure out you actually do have a capacity issue, we'll tell you and help you fix that too. As we like to say: add coverage first, then capacity if needed.