A Federal Medical Center: Neutral Host Active Fiber DAS Across 410,000 Sq Ft

The Mike O'Callaghan Federal Medical Center is a large federal hospital spanning 410,444 square feet across multiple floors, from the lower level through the upper patient and clinical floors. The facilities services contractor responsible for the building, J&J Worldwide Services, engaged RSRF to improve in-building cellular coverage for the facility. In a hospital environment, reliable cellular coverage supports staff coordination, patients and visitors, and emergency communications, so the goal was dependable coverage from every carrier throughout the building.

The facility needed reliable in-building coverage for all major carriers across the entire building, not just the areas already served. An existing system covered only part of the hospital, leaving gaps across the remaining floors. For a building of this size and construction, the outside macro network could not deliver consistent indoor coverage on its own. The client needed a partner who could engineer coverage for the full facility and integrate signal for every carrier into a single coordinated system.

A working medical center is one of the most constrained environments for this kind of deployment. Patient care runs continuously, so installation had to be carefully sequenced around hospital operations, with much of the work scheduled for nights, weekends, and holidays and only limited ceiling access available during any given session. The system also had to integrate cleanly with coverage infrastructure already present in part of the building, extending and unifying coverage rather than starting from scratch. Coordinating a multi-carrier deployment across a large, occupied facility of this kind demanded careful engineering and close coordination with the facilities team.

RSRF designed and deployed a neutral host active fiber Distributed Antenna System built on CommScope's Era C-RAN platform. A neutral host design was the right approach because it welcomes carrier-grade signal sources from every operator into a single shared system, so one DAS serves all major carriers rather than requiring a separate system per carrier.

Head-end equipment was centralized in the main data frame room, with transport extension nodes placed in intermediate distribution closets throughout the building and carrier access points distributing signal out to the in-building antennas. The architecture allowed coverage to reach every floor of the hospital while integrating with infrastructure already in place. The system was engineered to LTE coverage criteria and designed to exceed the minimum performance thresholds across the covered area, with RSRF coordinating signal sources for each carrier as part of the scope.

RSRF delivered a neutral host active fiber DAS covering the full 410,444 square foot medical center, bringing dependable coverage for every major carrier to all floors of the hospital. The neutral host architecture gave the facility a single, carrier-agnostic system ready to accept carrier-grade signal sources, and the phased, off-hours installation approach kept an active hospital running throughout the work. Post-installation, RSRF's Network Operations Center provides ongoing monitoring, maintenance, and support under a multi-year service agreement.