Who builds the indoor wireless network: carrier or customer?

“At first, operators didn’t invest in indoor coverage unless they absolutely had to,” Niedermaier said. “Now they see it as a necessity for their customers. Otherwise their high-dollar 3G revenue strategies don’t work.”

Unlike designing coverage solutions for malls, stadiums and conference centers, building indoor solutions for enterprises has always been a zero-sum game for operators, said Peter Jarich, indoor coverage has always been a zero-sum game. Those enterprises are invariably existing customers, so operators gain no new contracts or subscribers, and while 3G usage might increase if signal strength is improved, the amount the enterprises pay for those data subscriptions doesn’t, Jarich said. The major benefit in deploying such networks is creating customer stickiness.

“With big-bucket accounts, an indoor system doesn’t improve your service revenues—it improves the customer relationship,” Jarich said. “Trying to get an operator to come and build one is tough. You have to be a major customer.”

So customer- and developer-initiated systems like Ave Maria’s or Hines’s would appear to be the answer that operators are looking for—improved coverage without any expense to the operator. There’s one major caveat though, Jarich said. When customers build systems, particularly DAS deployments, they want to build carrier-neutral platforms allowing any operator to extend service into their corridors, not just their primary mobile supplier, Jarich said. Operators are loathe to share networks with their competitors, and for that reason, operators are probably still reluctant to support such platforms even if they’re not paying to build them, Jarich said.

Carriers are caught in a version of the prisoners’ dilemma, Jarich said. A carrier-neutral system would benefit all carriers expanding their coverage, but their coverage relative to one another would remain the same. If no carrier cooperates, no one benefits for expanded coverage, and their relative coverage remains the same. “Operators compete on coverage,” Jarich said. “It’s ‘I’m better than you’ rather than ‘I’m everywhere’ that’s important to most of them.”

Of course, if one operator chooses to go against the grain and support a customer-built DAS system, then the other operators may be forced to jump on board. That may be what the industry is beginning to see with deployments at Ave Maria and 300 N. LaSalle, Jarich said. But he believes operators will likely look to alternate solutions to compete at the indoor level, such as femtocells and picocells, which are linked to specific operators. Operators won’t truly embrace carrier-neutral network solutions, Jarich said, until network coverage becomes so ubiquitous, forcing operators to compete primarily on services rather than signal bars.