Texas Tech Upgrades Antennas for Stadium Rehab

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 07/26/10

When a phone company's name is on your university's facility, do you want calls made through its cellular service to be dropped inside that building? Avoiding that scenario may be part of the reasoning behind Texas Tech University's decision to deploy a new antenna system to support cellular service in a newly renovated stadium. Jones AT&T Stadium has just gone through an $84 million upgrade, which included construction of a new, 175,000-square-foot building.

As part of the new construction the university installed InterReach Fusion and FlexWave Prism distributed antenna systems from ADC to support the ability for AT&T mobile subscribers to place calls and use broadband Internet service during events.

"We often have more than 50,000 fans in our stadium for a game and they had problems placing calls or had calls drop," said David Hougland, director of sports broadcasting at the Lubbock-based university. "Now, with the ADC system, we have the capacity to handle the call needs of our fans."

The setup includes a FlexWave Prism system with two remote units to cover large areas of the stadium seating and five InterReach Fusion Main Hubs to supply coverage to the interior of the new building added to the stadium, as well as eight Expansion Hubs and 37 remote antenna units. The equipment divides coverage into nine specific sectors to optimize frequency re-use and provide maximum available bandwidth to any portion of the stadium.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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