A U.S. Air Force Base Medical Center: Active Fiber DAS Engagement for a Large Military Hospital

The facility is a U.S. Air Force base medical center, a large hospital and clinic that delivers patient care throughout the day across a building of roughly 250,000 square feet. Reliable cellular service inside the building matters for staff coordination and for the people who work and are cared for there, but the building's size and construction left coverage unreliable in many areas. RSRF had supported the facility over several years before designing a comprehensive system.

Indoor cellular coverage across the building was unreliable, with weak signal in interior areas away from the exterior walls. Earlier coverage had been added incrementally with consumer-grade boosters, expanded area by area as needs came up over the years. Eventually that approach reached its ceiling. Consumer-grade equipment could not deliver consistent, building-wide coverage at the scale and reliability a hospital of this size requires, and it left the facility without a single, carrier-grade system covering the whole building.

The work had to fit around an active medical environment that could not be interrupted. The building runs patient care throughout the day, so installation work was restricted to after-hours windows, with crews arriving in the late afternoon and working into the night. As a federal facility, the site required security arrangements for outside contractors and coordinated access. The building's scale and layout also called for a designed, engineered system rather than another point fix, with careful cabling and antenna planning to carry coverage consistently across the entire footprint.

RSRF designed an active fiber distributed antenna system to cover the entire building and deliver AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile service throughout. The active fiber architecture uses a head-end in the main equipment room that conditions and combines carrier signal sources, converts it to optical, and distributes it over single-mode fiber to high-power remote units placed across the building, which feed a network of coaxial cable and antennas designed to a full iBwave plan. The design supports LTE and 5G NR across each carrier's bands and is engineered to a defined coverage standard across the occupied areas. RSRF's scope covered the full turnkey effort, from RF engineering and the design package through installation, cabling, termination and testing, commissioning, and optimization, with carrier coordination to secure signal sources and ongoing remote monitoring available from the RSRF Network Operations Center.

After years of incremental, consumer-grade coverage at the facility, RSRF brought an engineered, carrier-grade approach built for a hospital of this scale, designed to cover the whole building across all three major carriers rather than patching one area at a time. The engagement reflects a multi-year working relationship in which the facility returned to RSRF as its coverage needs grew, from early targeted fixes to a comprehensive building-wide system.