DAS retrofit restores public-safety coverage at a 540-bed hospital

Context

A regional non-profit health system was in the final stages of a façade replacement project on its main 540-bed hospital. The new Low-E glass had improved energy performance — and crippled public-safety radio coverage on three floors. The local AHJ had issued a coverage violation and put the hospital on a 90-day remediation timeline.

The problem

The original DAS had been installed in 2009 and was end-of-life. The AHJ wanted ERRCS coverage that met the city's specific interpretation of NFPA 72 — which differed from the generic spec sheet the previous integrator had used. The hospital had received three vendor proposals, ranging from $1.4M to $3.6M, with no consistent methodology between them.

Our approach

• We met with the AHJ before design, in person, with the hospital's facilities lead. We documented the AHJ's interpretation of coverage requirements in writing — including the specific floors, stairwells, and elevator banks that had to pass grid testing.
• We surveyed the existing building against current carrier and public-safety bands. We documented exactly where coverage was failing, not just where it was weak.
• We designed a hybrid DAS: an active head-end serving new BDAs on the affected floors, reusing existing riser fiber where condition permitted, and adding new fiber where it didn't.
• We opened the carrier signal-source conversations directly and got two of three major carriers re-signed to the hospital's MOU. The third was documented as a known gap, with operator agreement.
• We wrote a vendor-neutral RFP and helped the hospital select an integrator. We attended weekly construction reviews until commissioning.
• Commissioning testing was witnessed by the AHJ and passed on the first pass.

The outcome

The hospital met the AHJ's 90-day deadline with first-pass acceptance. The final installed cost came in 22% under the median of the three original vendor proposals. The hospital retained all design documentation and now uses it as the template for two additional facilities under planning.

"What we didn't appreciate going in was how much of this was a documentation problem, not a hardware problem. They got the AHJ to write down what they actually wanted. Once that existed, the rest was engineering."

Measurable results