Few DAS platforms in the U.S. and their similarities

There are a lot of different types of DAS platforms in the U.S. market from a handful of manufacturers. This does not mean that there are not other manufacturers. I will just show in alphabetical order the platforms and manufacturers we have dealt with in the past.

ADRF is an old repeater manufacturer, which started DAS 2.0 platform a few years ago. 2 DAS platform that ADRF sells are: ADX and ADXV

BTI is a relatively new comer in U.S. compared to the other manufacturers shown here. DAS 2.0 platforms from BTI are:

1. mBSC-C (High power remote),

2. mBSC-CM (Mid power remote)

Commscope and Corning are giants in DAS industry and holds a big part of the market share. Well known Commscope platforms are:

1. ION-B,

2. ION-M,

3. ION-U

Few of the Corning MobileAccess DAS 2.0 platforms in the market are:

1. MA1000/MA2000 (1 Watt power output)

2. HX (2 Watt power output)

3. GX (5 or 20 Watt power output)

JMA Wireless is relatively new in the DAS 2.0 field, but already has presence in big arenas, such as Viking Stadium for Super Bowl 2018. TEKO is JMA’s flagship platform.

SOLiD had been in the market for a while now, and already their DAS 2.0 platforms have been deployed in a lot of well known venues. Well known DAS 2.0 platforms from SOLiD are:

1. ALLIANCE (Neutral Host)

2. EXPRESS (Single Operator or Carrier)

Core architecture of the majority of the DAS 2.0 platforms are similar, although configuration, feature set, ease of operation can vary quite a bit. To illustrate the similarity in architectures, let’s look at 3 DAS platforms from 3 manufacturers – SOLiD, Corning and Commscope and how close are their architecture to the core architecture of DAS 2.0 we have talked about. To keep it simple I will just show signals going in the downlink path.

In the table below, I am showing the generic name of an electronic, and their names in different DAS platforms. They may have different feature sets, but the core function is same. For example, RF Interface Unit (RIU) is known in SOLiD Alliance DAS as Base Station Interface Unit or BIU. Similarly, RIU is called Radio Interface Unit (RIU) on a Corning MobileAccess DAS and Point of Interface (TPOI) on a Commscope ION-B DAS.

Now let's review a block diagram of core architecture of a few DAS platforms mentioned in the table above.

Block diagrams of DAS architecture of different platforms

As you can see, although we are looking at 3 different platforms from 3 different gear manufacturers, architecture is very similar. Same function, different names and features.

And finally, in the picture below, we will see how they actually look.

Related Post:

Core architecture of DAS 2.0