Who builds the indoor wireless network: carrier or customer?

300 North LaSalle, a just-completed office tower named for its address in Chicago, has one feature that clearly distinguishes it from other prime real estate in the city: a roof-to-basement indoor wireless system that can provide cellular and PCS coverage in the building’s every nook and cranny—even the elevator shafts.

In the Everglades outside of Naples Florida at the newly built campus of Ave Maria University, students, faculty and staff go inside the buildings to get better wireless reception rather than take their handset outside to get more bars. The nearest cell tower is 7 miles away, but its campus-wide distributed antenna system (DAS) provides 100% coverage indoors, even penetrating the thick hurricane-reinforced concrete walls of the dorms and library.

Both of those indoor deployments, however, weren’t initiated by the operators who supplied the service. Instead the administration of Ave Maria and the developers of 300 N. LaSalle, Hines Construction, built them at their own expense. They are at the forefront of growing trend in which customers are taking their indoor coverage problems into their own hands, first securing permission from operators to deploy networks over their valuable spectrum and then contracting with systems integrators and vendors to plan their indoor coverage platforms, said John Niedermaier, general manager of wireless coverage at ADC (NASDAQ:ADCT), which supplied the DAS architecture for both deployments.

In the case of Hines, the anchor tenant for the new skyscraper specifically requested that indoor coverage be built into its 28 stories overlooking the Chicago riverfront. Hines decided to wire the whole building, creating a carrier-neutral system any operator can link into if it chooses. Ave Maria also built a carrier-neutral system that connects to the closest cell tower using a repeater installed on the roof of its library.

Traditionally, carriers have implemented their own indoor coverage platforms, but rarely and usually at the persistent request of a large customer, Niedermaier said. Due to the cost and planning required to subscribers, indoor coverage was hardly been a priority for most operators. They prefer to reach subscribers by enhancing macro-area network, which improves their overall coverage and capacity for all subscribers rather than a limited number of existing customers. But as 3G data services have taken off, operators have become more open to the idea of indoor systems as more data consumption takes place inside rather than out, Niedermaier said.