Illinois High School Deploys Digital DAS System

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Wednesday, October 25, 2017 | Comments

Cobham Wireless joined with a number of organizations and local first responders to provide Evanston Township High School (ETHS) in Illinois with a Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular and public-safety communications solution.

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Improving cellular and public-safety coverage in ETHS, the largest U.S. high school under one roof, ensures staff and students can communicate rapidly and reliably with Evanston’s police and fire departments in emergency situations, as well as providing a high quality of service to AT&T subscribers.

The system provides AT&T in-building coverage for ETHS’s more than 4,000 students and staff. It also improves both public-safety communications and ETHS’s 50-member safety team, which uses AT&T’s push-to-talk (PTT) service.

“The safety and well-being of our staff and students is our primary concern, and communications between emergency service teams plays a major part in this,” said Mary Rodino, chief financial officer (CFO), ETHS. “The project has tackled the school’s connectivity problems. This is probably the first time that a community has banded together in this way, and the project has helped forge closer links between the school, AT&T, local police and fire departments, and the wireless industry.”

Cobham Wireless worked with Radvisory 5G, as well as RFS, Galtronics, Graybar, Chicago Communications and Fullerton Engineering, to design and deploy the system, which connects to AT&T’s nearby cell tower. The system is based on Cobham Wireless’ digital distributed antenna system (DAS) technology. All parties contributed equipment and services, with AT&T donating a significant amount of testing and engineering time, so that the system, and subsequent five-year maintenance, was fully financed at no cost to the school.

“AT&T is pleased to support this project and has been impressed by the collaborative efforts to achieve better and more reliable cellular and public-safety communications inside ETHS,” said Warren Salek, AT&T assistant vice president, radio access network.

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