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InnerWireless Blog |
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The HIMSS12 Annual Conference and Exhibition is just around the corner. Leading up to this event we have been looking at the impact and growth of wireless – especially in healthcare where DAS (distributed antenna system) is recognized as one of the key new technologies. For hospitals, wireless has become mission-critical so let’s look at high-availability wireless in terms of Everything, Everywhere, Everytime.
Everything
For many hospitals, providing in-building wireless coverage has meant designing and installing as many as 5 separate wireless networks. Every network is installed with different cabling and antennas, each requiring maintenance and surveillance. In contrast, with a broadband DAS, one infrastructure can be RF designed and installed to deliver one, two or virtually every wireless that is consumed in today’s hospitals.
Everywhere
Wireless coverage and signal quality are not only hallmarks of high-availability wireless, but are performance measures that should be guaranteed. Poor wireless coverage not only frustrates users and generates non-value added IT help desk calls, but it can also degrade overall system performance. To an end user, wireless coverage is about the ability to use their wireless device of choice wherever they require in a facility. To meet this expectation, a wireless solution should be designed to provide the required signal level via ubiquitous coverage for all wireless services in the facility.
Everytime
Wireless capacity and system reliability are the final cornerstones of a high-availability wireless solution. With the increased adoption of smartphones, iPads and other devices, wireless device density is increasing concern. While a user may have 5 bars of coverage, more and more wireless networks are becoming overloaded and unable to process traffic. Wireless traffic management is key new strategy in maintaining connectivity and optimizing service levels over time to maximize a wireless investment.
Everything, Everywhere, Everytime. For many hospitals, these are key attributes for a mission-critical wireless deployment. Read about your colleagues experience in deploying DAS for key wireless services in a collection of newly published interviews:
We hope that we can then continue the conversation at HIMMS12. We will be located in booth 4623 with our partner, CommScope, and ready to talk about DAS or other Black Box Network Services.
Just returned from the IMSformation Access and Offload Symposium. Wireless data continues to grow at an unprecedented rate and AT&T stated an 8000% increase in wireless data over the last 4 years. Today, 80% of all wireless data occurs in-building.
Michael Zachary, Director, IT Enterprise Architecture at Cook Chidren’s in Fort Worth, Texas offered a glimpse at how this growth is manifesting itself in healthcare.
 Healthcare data applications, such as Computerized Physician Order Entry, Radiology PACS, Electronic Medical Records, and Bedside Medicine Verification and medical devices, including mobile carts, wireless IV, public safety, and VoIP devices, are all going wireless. Add to this, the fact that everyone from physicians, to patients, to families, are bringing in their own devices, including smartphones, it is not uncommon to have 6, 8, or even 10 data-intensive wireless devices in a single room.
This density of devices, with numerous wireless technologies, including 3G/4G and Wi-Fi, is requiring hospitals to provide wireless networks that are fast, reliable, provide complete coverage, and enable complete mobility without interruption.
For Cook Children’s using a wireless infrastructure that supported 3G/4G, 802.11, paging, public safety, and two-way radio provided the answer. One infrastructure, providing wall-to-wall coverage for every wireless frequency with optimized capacity for both 3G/4G and Wi-Fi provided the hospital with a wireless network that they could call medical grade.
Normally I tweet wireless and DAS happenings that are both interesting and relevant, but occasionally I come across an article that has more impact that others. Starting from Scratch is one such article.
Over the past several years there has been an increasing number of articles on DAS and it’s application in healthcare, but this is the first that has put DAS on equal footing as recognized must have healthcare applications, such as EHR:
As the article states, building a hospital with state-of-the-art information technology is harder than it looks, and these capabilities provide a new baseline. Congratulations to two of InnerWireless’ customers, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and Centura Health, for contributing to the article and most importantly leading the way in healthcare IT.
Smartphones are all the rage and recently there have been an increasing number of statistics to show how important smartphones are becoming:
- 70% of U.S. physicians/executives using smartphones – Diffusion Group
- Smartphones will be 41% of total handsets – Diffusion Group
- 70% of hospitals will deploy the iPad – HIMSS
- 56% of Wi-Fi devices are smartphones – JiWire
- Wireless video will grow to be more than 66% of all traffic – Cisco
At the same time, in-building wireless solutions to support smartphones are increasing in popularity. Why? External wireless networks are meant to support 3G and 4G smartphones in the outside world and sometimes, we all get lucky and have adequate support indoors. But for mission-critical wireless, Distributed Antenna Systems are required to overcome in-building wireless challenges and provide smartphone access that is required in healthcare, Fortune 500, public venues, hospitality, and government facilities:
- External wireless networks only provides 20% in-building coverage
- Large and high-rise buildings are not wireless friendly – DAS provides coverage and capacity below ground floors, in high-rises, in large footprints, and where low-e glass and other RF problematic internal materials are used
- 3G and newer 4G technologies are increasing data speeds that require increasingly better coverage – a DAS is required to enabled adequate data performance
Take a look at here for more information.
With the convergence of 3G/4G cellular and Wi-Fi on devices, such as smartphones, the question that we get from IT professionals is “what is the best way to support both technologies“.
Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) are becoming increasingly popular to support wide-area services, including 3G/4G cellular, but can a DAS be used to support Wireless LAN (WLAN) as well – thereby creating a network that can fully support the devices?
This is a question that generates a lot of debate.
Background: Not all Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) use the same architecture or support all wireless services. While all DAS vendors support wide area services, support for WLAN varies greatly. Some vendors do not support WLAN at all, some only support 802.11b/g, some add in support for 802.11a, and only a very few support 802.11n. In most of these cases, vendors that support WLAN on DAS create a one-to-one mapping between access points and DAS antennas – touting benefits, such as centralized/secure access points and reduced cabling, but making newer technologies, such as 802.11n with MIMO, difficult and costly to implement. With minimal value, it is simplest to say, “Deploy a DAS for 3G/4G cellular and a separate discrete micro-cellular network for WLAN”.
But traditional WLAN is not perfect and the explosion of converged devices are amplifying issues related to coverage and capacity. Enter Layered WLAN (L-WLAN).
InnerWireless: InnerWireless enables a network that supports both wide area services and WLAN. For wide area services, InnerWireless deploys a fiber-coax DAS – Horizon4G. For WLAN, InnerWireless deploys L-WLAN – a broadband, remote antenna solution with channel layering to support all 802.11 capabilities, including 802.11n with MIMO and special streaming. Creating a mission-critical WLAN with the following attributes:
- Coverage Segment – Engineered placement of remote, broadband antennas yields a seamless RF layer with assured coverage and high signal quality in line with the most demanding Wi-Fi clients – voice handsets, data/video tablets, and medical devices. InnerWireless avoids the artificial boundaries that traditional micro-cellular wireless LAN systems impose, letting client devices move freely throughout the network without signal degradation associated with AP placement, blockages, shadows and with minimal roaming.
- Channel Layering - Initially, a Coverage Segment requires only one radio channel, allowing other channels to be added for expansion/capacity. Additional channels are activated by adding more radios, scaling the network capacity linearly with the number of channels, without additional RF engineering or reworking the channel plan.
- Application-Specific Traffic Management – Applications are unique and transmit different amounts of data; voice telephony is latency sensitive, periodic, but limited traffic; while, streaming media generates large amounts of traffic. Micro-cellular access points are non-deterministic and have handle multiple types of traffic efficiently, but as the number of clients increases the performance of each access point degrades significantly. Channel Layering allows similar applications to be grouped on a single channel (e.g. voice on one channel, video on a second, etc.) such that an AP only carries similar traffic, enabling increased performance across the network.
- 802.11n and Legacy Fairness - The typical WLAN often involves clients that are capable of a wide range of protocols and data rates – from 802.11b to 802.11g and 802.11a to 802.11n. While newer technologies such as 802.11n enable higher data rates, legacy clients, which require backwards compatibility / coexistence mechanism, always degrade overall performance in a micro-cellular WLAN. With Channel Layering, 802.11n clients can be separated from legacy clients, such that all clients operate at their maximum data rates – enabling 802.11n clients to operate as if they are connected to a Greenfield network.
- Physical Layer Segregation – InnerWireless is the only vendor that can secure RF at the physical layer. While Channel Layering can be applied to applications and network protocols, it can also be applied in broader ways – complete separation of networks. Mission-critical networks (such as a clinical network in a hospital) can be separated from public networks. This separation ensures that the public network cannot degrade the mission-critical network, neither from a performance or security perspective – a key attribute of an ISO/IEC 80001 compliant network.
InnerWireless is committed to making Wi-Fi better – we guarantee coverage and enable significantly better WLAN performance than a discrete micro-cellular network - independently verified by Novarum. This is why over 90% of InnerWireless customers have embraced L-WLAN and Horizon4G to ensure full support of converged devices.
Posted in 4G, 802.11, DAS
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