Mobile Signal Boosting for Offices
Poor mobile signal inside an office can be surprisingly disruptive.
Calls drop when people move away from windows. Staff disappear into corridors or meeting rooms and lose service. Visitors arrive on different mobile networks. Two-factor authentication codes, mobile applications and ordinary voice calls become unreliable in parts of the building.
Yet the mobile coverage outside may be perfectly good.
Modern office construction can substantially reduce the radio signal entering the building. Coated or energy-efficient glazing, reinforced concrete, steel structures and insulated building materials can all contribute to poor indoor coverage.
Litenet surveys, designs and installs commercial mobile coverage systems for offices and other commercial buildings throughout the UK.
Why Do Offices Have Poor Mobile Signal?
The mobile network does not stop at the front door — but the building can make it extremely difficult for the signal to get inside.
This is particularly common in modern offices.
Energy-efficient glazing can reflect radio signals. Reinforced concrete floors and walls can reduce propagation between different parts of the building. Steel structures, internal partitions and building cores can make the situation more complicated again.
Coverage can therefore vary significantly across the same office.
Reception may have usable service while meeting rooms, internal offices, stairwells or lower floors have very little.
And looking at a network coverage map will not reveal what is happening inside the actual building.
That is why we start by measuring it.
Mobile Coverage Is Still Important in a Wi-Fi Building
Good Wi-Fi does not remove the need for good mobile coverage.
Employees increasingly move between fixed and mobile communications throughout the working day, while visitors, contractors and customers may never connect to the corporate Wi-Fi network at all.
Mobile phones may also be used for authentication, messaging, mobile applications and communication while people move around the building.
For organisations occupying several floors, coverage can become particularly noticeable when people move between meeting rooms, offices, communal areas and other parts of the property.
The objective is straightforward:
Give people usable mobile coverage in the places where the business actually needs it.
We Survey the Building Before Designing the System
You don't need to know which mobile signal booster you need.
That's our job.
A professional mobile signal survey allows us to understand the actual mobile environment inside and outside the property.
We can assess the signal available from the relevant mobile networks, identify where service deteriorates and determine which areas genuinely need improvement.
We also look at the building itself.
Floor layouts, construction materials, equipment locations, cable routes and potential antenna positions all influence the eventual design.
Some businesses primarily need to improve one corporate mobile network.
Others need broader coverage because employees, customers and visitors use several different networks.
The solution should follow the requirement — not the other way around.
Designed Around the Office
There is no single standard office-building solution.
A small company occupying one floor presents a very different challenge from a multi-storey headquarters, business centre or large commercial property.
Coverage may be required throughout the building or only in particular areas.
There may also be underground rooms, internal meeting spaces or parts of the building where the external mobile signal simply cannot penetrate effectively.
That is why we design around the actual building, available mobile signal and required coverage area.
The same principle applies to new offices and refurbishment projects.
Considering mobile coverage earlier can make antenna positions, equipment locations and cable routes easier to integrate into the wider communications infrastructure.
Installation, Testing and Validation
Once the requirement has been established, Litenet can manage the complete process:
Survey. Design. Installation. Commissioning. Testing. Validation. Support.
After installation, we can measure the mobile environment again to confirm that coverage has improved in the areas the system was designed to serve.
That is considerably more useful than simply switching on a booster and checking how many bars appear on a phone.
The aim is a properly designed commercial mobile coverage system that solves the original problem.