The City took over an existing building in 2005 as the site of its new City Hall. As part of the retrofitting process, the City had a DAS installed in order to comply with International Fire Code regulations. Designed to support just two frequencies, the DAS didn’t provide strong public safety coverage in the basement and other below-grade levels of the building, nor in most of the parking garage, and it supported only one band of commercial cellular traffic in only parts of the building. When the carrier phased out the supported cellular frequency after a few years, the building’s workers were left without cellular coverage in hard-to-reach places.
“Providing public safety radio and cellular services throughout the building by leveraging our existing fiber-optic investments and getting away from the traditional coax-based DAS was important to us,” said Jim Rawley, Network Systems and Security Lead in the City of Bellevue IT Department.
