Background

The iconic new Central Bank of Ireland headquarters in Dublin City stands eight storeys tall and occupies two basement levels. With a total area of approximately 29,000m2 and completed to the highest standards of energy conservation and sustainability, this prestigious building is ‘home’ to more than 1500 employees. However, cellular coverage proved to be almost non-existent throughout the premises, severely compromising wireless communication for both business and personal purposes. Boldyn was approached to provide indoor mobile signal boosters to increase the cellular coverage of the building.

Challenges and considerations

The Central Bank chose Boldyn as their partner to solve the building’s shielding problems and bring mobile coverage and capacity back to optimal levels. Consulting with original architect Henry J Lyons at the internal building fit-out stage, we learnt that the building was ‘insulated’ by a simple but sophisticated glass skin. This glass skin, in turn, was protected and shielded from glare and solar heat gain by an outer layer of anodised aluminium triangular mesh panels.

The design used high-performance, long-life materials to create a highly sustainable and energy-efficient building. So in order to bring the new essential utility of indoor cellular coverage into the workplace, we specified a Multi-Operator Distributed Antenna System (DAS) to connect employees – from the deepest underground basement to the top floor – with the outside world.

Cellular coverage proved to be almost non-existent throughout the premises.

Solutions and delivery

Our mission was to provide indoor mobile signal boosters to increase the reliability of indoor cellular coverage. Over just eight months, working in cooperation with the main contractors, the indoor network coverage system that we installed was:

• a 3 Sector Passive MultiOperator DAS
• designed to the latest Joint Operator Specifications
• fully GSM900-, GSM1800-, LTE1800-, UMTS2100-, UMTS900 and LTE800-compatible

As part of our commitment to deliver genuinely end-to-end projects, Boldyn took responsibility for:

• the design and installation of the system
• the procurement of materials
• the commissioning of the repeater-fed passive multi-operator system…

which now delivers 3G and 4G – and ultimately 5G – coverage to all ten floors

Technical summary

Boldyn’s DAS solution comprised a three-sector passive multi-operator Distributed Antenna System (DAS) featuring:

• 114 antennae
• over 2,650m of coaxial cable
• 100+ couplers
• three-sector front-end combiner