NotionSpace: Active DAS for a Washington DC Residential Building

400 K Street NW is a luxury residential apartment community in Washington DC, organized into east and west wings with resident hallways throughout, plus shared common areas and an interior parking garage. The total environment spans about 251,000 square feet, the bulk of it apartment homes, with common space and garage levels rounding out the footprint. For a residential building of this profile, dependable cellular service is something residents expect everywhere they live in the building, not just near the windows.

The building needed reliable in-building cellular coverage for every major carrier across the full property, including apartments, common areas, and the parking garage. Delivering that consistently across a large multi-wing residential structure, all the way down into garage levels where outdoor signal does not reach, called for a designed distributed antenna system rather than any partial fix. The goal was strong, uniform coverage across the great majority of the building for AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

The system had to go into a fully occupied residential building without disrupting the people living there. Work that meant drilling and other noise had to run through resident hallways, so it was scheduled and communicated in advance and timed around residents, including coordinated early-morning starts. The installation also faced hole-cutting limitations, which called for an on-site walk-through with the contractor to confirm exactly where cable could be installed and accessed before work began. Distribution had to reach across the building's two wings, including identifying the dedicated fiber runs that would feed the east and west sides from the head-end. In a luxury building, the finish and the resident experience mattered as much as the coverage, so careful sequencing and coordination were central throughout.

RSRF deployed an active fiber distributed antenna system designed to cover the large majority of the building and carry AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile across their LTE and supporting bands. Carrier base station and radio sources feed a head-end in the building's main equipment room, which converts the signal to optical and distributes it over single-mode fiber to remote units placed across the building, with a preliminary design of one head-end and three remotes feeding the antenna network through to the garage. RSRF handled the full turnkey scope, from the RF site survey and an iBwave engineering design package through installation, sweep testing, integration, commissioning, and a final as-built close-out package, and coordinated directly with each carrier to integrate and approve their signal sources. The design targeted a strong coverage threshold across roughly 90 to 95 percent of the building.

RSRF delivered a designed, carrier-coordinated active DAS reaching apartments, common areas, and the garage across a building of roughly a quarter-million square feet, engineered to a consistent coverage standard for all three major carriers. The work was completed inside an occupied luxury residential building, sequenced around residents and the building's wings, and closed out with full commissioning and as-built documentation. RSRF also provides ongoing remote monitoring from its Network Operations Center to keep the system performing over time.