Northern Kentucky University students are complaining that their cell coverage on campus is effectively unusable. According to the school’s student paper, the 15,000-student university is considering installation of a distributed antenna system, or DAS. The way the student paper discusses the problem, it’s not hard to imagine poor cell coverage becoming a key indicator of low quality of on-campus life and an obstacle to recruiting new students.
Universities are expected to be an important market for DAS, but few schools mention the technology by name on their websites. The University of Texas at Austin announced two years ago this month that AT&T, Sprint & Verizon all agreed to participate in an on-campus DAS network, which the university noted comes at substantial expense to the carriers.
St. Michaels College, a small, 100-year-old private school in Vermont, said on its website this spring: “Sprint has installed a distributed antenna system to enhance their signal on campus. This system provides Sprint 3g coverage outside and inside all of our facilities including dorm rooms.” That text has since been removed from the college’s page of information about its telecommunication resources and has been replaced with “St. Michael’s has a Cell Phone Strategy with Sprint.”
According to the DAS Forum, a 5-year-old DAS industry advocacy group, among the major drivers for DAS adoption (PDF) are a move towards higher educational institutions decommissioning land lines and a reported shift to wireless-only use by 26% of wireless college users.
