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Low-power repeaters excel in small projects but struggle with medium and large buildings due to signal loss and distribution inefficiencies. High-power repeaters or telecom signal sources are often impractical due to cost, regulations, and complexity. Alternatives like combining systems or repeated amplification risk noise, oscillation, and compliance issues. Zyxel’s ZoneDAS Active DAS system offers a game-changing solution, leveraging low-power repeaters to deliver efficient, scalable, and cost-effective coverage for larger projects, ensuring flexibility, future upgrades, and support for 5G applications.
Helpless for Medium and Large Buildings?
Your company sells low-power boosters or repeaters, even those operator-specific ones. You even use these repeaters to provide indoor mobile signal coverage system integration projects to your customers. However, due to its low output power, generally speaking, you only provide services to households, small retail stores, and small and medium-sized businesses. For larger buildings, you are helpless? When encountering such needs, can you only let these potential business opportunities pass by? Not necessarily! Below we will explore the challenges of signal coverage system engineering in medium and large buildings, possible solutions, and how to power up your low-power repeater as Popeye eating spinach, Super Mario eating mushrooms, or even Clark Kent who can transform into Superman showing his invincible "superpowers".
Low-power Is Ideal for Small Projects
As the name given, low-power repeaters or boosters amplify and output low-power signals, and their architecture relies on coaxial cables to distribute the signals via splitters, couplers, and ultimately arrive at multiple indoor antennas. However, these passive components naturally cannot avoid the physical attenuation of signal power throughout this whole structure. When the available signal strength that can be used for distribution after amplification is not high enough, naturally you cannot connect too long a coaxial cable, nor too many splitters or couplers to a large number of indoor antennas. In this way, each indoor antenna only gets subtle signal energy (EiRP), and the antenna cannot cover the space where it should be responsible for. Therefore, low-power signal repeaters of course cannot be directly applied to medium and large indoor signal coverage projects. So how should we deal with large-scale cases?
Simple, Using High-Power Repeater Instead?
Naturally, the first solution that comes to mind is upgrading to mid-to-high power repeaters. Setting aside for now whether high-power signal sources equipment can perform effectively for real usage in the field(we'll explore this topic separately!), you attempt to find the high-output power repeaters in the market. However, you quickly discover that such equipment often lacks the necessary certifications from local authorities, cannot be legally imported, or requires special government approval to be installed and operated legally.
Undeterred, you think of applying to telecom operators for accessing high-power signal sources directly from their base stations, hoping to feed these high-power signals into the distribution system. You try to contact telecom companies—finding the right point of contact is already a stroke of luck—but more often than not, you end up being turned away. The main reason is the high cost of base station equipment and the annual license fees payable to its suppliers. After weighing out the ROI, Telecom companies generally are unwilling to install base station for signal access for private residential, enterprise or hotel buildings.
Moreover, if your client's demand is for indoor signals coverage of ALL, not single, mobile operators, the complexity multiplies: you would need each operator’s agreement to install their base station equipment on site to provide the access. Finally, you realize that unless the facility serves a public interest—such as large shopping malls, five-star hotels, airports, or critical transportation hubs like railway stations—it is virtually impossible to obtain high-power base station signal sources from telecom companies.
Set Multiple Small Relay System Together?
Alright! Acquiring mid-to-high power signal sources is indeed challenging. You might think, "If one repeater system can't cover a large area, then maybe two, three, or even multiple systems combined will do the trick?" Sure, it looks like a feasible approach, but it comes with its own challenges.
First, each repeater system requires a separate outdoor antenna. Whether the property owner agrees to installing multiple outdoor antennas at various locations—potentially affecting the building's aesthetics—is a critical factor. If the owner objects, using a single outdoor antenna to split the signal and feed multiple repeaters might be an alternative.
However, even if this setup seems workable, there are some points you should be aware. First, the distance between donor antenna to repeater. Ideally, outdoor antennas should not be too far from the repeaters, and the signal strength received by the antenna must be adequate. Otherwise, the coaxial cable connected in between may cause significant signal loss, potentially reducing the signal to unusable levels—or worse, no signal at all—rendering the repeater ineffective. Secondly, on the other hand, the distance from Repeater to Coverage Area. Basically, we want repeaters installed as close as possible to the target coverage areas to minimize signal loss within the distribution structure. This creates a challenging dilemma in installation design. While the idea may appear feasible, its execution often proves impractical.
Amplifying Signals Repeatedly? Stop Kidding!
You might also consider this: deploying a small-scale signal coverage system first, then using the wireless signal propagated from its indoor antenna as the signal source for another repeater system to extend coverage further until the building is fully covered like playing a jigsaw puzzle. No, no, no! Stop there—we strongly advise against this!
Here’s why: signals received from outdoor base stations already include environmental noise. When a signal is amplified by a repeater, that noise is also amplified. Amplifying the signal once may still yield acceptable results, but doing so twice, thrice, or more will lead to an unmanageable level of noise. Eventually, mobile users will receive nothing but overpowering noise, making calls and data usage impossible.
Besides excessive noise, this method carries another significant risk: signal oscillation. If the source antenna picks up signals amplified by its own repeating system, it creates a feedback loop—just like a microphone picking up sound from a speaker. This results in an infinitely amplifying signal loop, generating loud noise. Worse still, these noises can propagate as uplink signals back to the telecom base station, causing widespread interference across the outdoor base station’s coverage area. The consequences? Not only will your project fail spectacularly, but you may also breach telecom regulations, landing you in serious legal trouble!
Active DAS: Unlocking the Full Potential of Low-Power Repeaters
You’ve tried every method to acquire more usable signal strength for distribution, but none seem effective. Perhaps it’s time to think if there is a system architecture that eliminates the signal loss caused by coaxial cables and splitters while enabling large-scale signal distribution with low-power signal sources. Yes, that’s exactly the features of an Active DAS (Read more: Beyond Limits: Active DAS for Next-Gen Connectivity).
The concept is simple: feed the signal source into the active system’s master unit, replace coaxial cables with Ethernet or fiber optic cables, substitute splitters and couplers with hub-like devices, and use Remote Units as indoor antennas. Since these are active devices, the power output at the endpoints can be configured through the system. This ensures effective coverage space for a given Remote Unit without considering any the signal loss that could incur in its structure and system design becomes as straightforward as deploying a WiFi network. For the high-frequency, high-attenuated, 5G signals, this is an exceptional solution.
However, generally, the active DAS systems are designed to accept signal input only from telecom base stations, and the high cost of active devices has limited their adoption in the market. Therefore, traditionally, the active systems are often used by Telco projects in large-scale venues such as airports, transportation hubs, and main shopping malls.
Zyxel’s Active DAS systems, the ZoneDAS Series, offer a groundbreaking solution. Not only are these systems more affordable, but they can also use low-power repeaters or boosters as the system’s signal sources, overcoming the challenge of acquiring base station signals for private buildings.
With this flexibility, you can continue using your company’s low-power repeaters as signal sources. This not only solves the problem of obtaining base station signals but also adds versatility to your applications. The modular architecture supports future upgrades and ensures tailored solutions, including 5G, for projects of any size. The result? No wasted costs and win more projects.
To learn more, visit our Active DAS System page, or leave us a message by contact us!
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