Smart buildings, smart assets was a smart name for the first panel on Day One of last week’s HetNet Expo in Chicago. Panelists explained the enterprise view of in-building cellular infrastructure, effectively setting the stage for the more in-depth discussions that followed.
“Wireless has really become the fourth utility,” said Marriott International’s Alex Ajdelsztajn. “The difference is: You don’t see anybody taking longer showers, you don’t see anybody leaving the light on, and we see the exact opposite [with wireless]. Marriott, which tracks data usage per hotel, does not see bandwidth usage growth leveling off, and Ajdelsztajn said the company is working hard to keep up with customer expectations. “Back in the not-so-distant past, you would come to a hotel room and find more technology than what you had at home, and now it’s the other way around,” he said.
“Not only do you need a good DAS system in a building, you need a good Wi-Fi in there to do some offload,” said Larry Heisler, director of marketing and global building technology solutions at Anixter. “People are running their businesses on mobile devices and they expect and need to have that connectivity consistently.”
“We’ll need to have some building assets that are smarter,” said Greg Watson, sales director at Zinwave. “From a hardware perspective we’ll see some changes in the types of infrastructure that will be required to actually support that. We will see changes in the types of modulation that are used to create that bandwidth, we’ll see changes in the actual frequencies that are used. So we’re going to need to have some smarter systems.”
