Olmsted Elementary School: All-Carrier Active Fiber DAS Across 114,081 Square Feet

Olmsted Elementary School is a new building at 7110 Prairie Avenue in Urbandale, Iowa, serving the Urbandale Community School District. The building totals roughly 114,081 square feet across two floors and was completed in June 2021. It was constructed primarily of metal stud drywall, with one section built in concrete to serve as a tornado shelter. The district wanted dependable cellular coverage throughout the building for everyday use by staff and visitors.

The site had roughly four bars of outdoor signal, but that coverage did not carry into the new building, and AT&T was the weakest carrier inside. The district needed reliable cellular service across the entire school. Coverage on US Cellular was a particular priority, since the district's own phones ran on US Cellular. The goal was usable cellphone service anywhere inside the building, for every major carrier.

Several factors made this more than a routine coverage project:

A new building on a June completion target. The school was still being finished as the project came together, with low-voltage cabling being run during construction. Coverage had to be designed and installed in step with the building itself rather than after the fact.

Four carriers, including US Cellular on its own spectrum. Coordinating AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile/Sprint was already a multi-carrier effort. US Cellular added a further wrinkle, because it owns its own spectrum in the region and had to be handled separately rather than folded in with the other carriers.

A concrete tornado shelter inside a drywall building. Most of the structure was metal stud drywall, but the tornado shelter section was built in concrete, a far harder material for cellular signal to penetrate. The design had to account for that difference rather than treating the whole building uniformly.

After surveying the site, RSRF recommended and engineered an active fiber distributed antenna system built on ADRF equipment. Active fiber suited a building of this size: it places the headend electronics in the main data frame room and distributes signal over single-mode fiber to remote units throughout both floors, where the signal is converted back to high-power RF and radiated through in-building antennas. This allowed RSRF to cover the full two-floor footprint from a centralized headend.

Signal for each carrier was sourced through off-air channelized bi-directional amplifiers, with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile/Sprint, and US Cellular each handled to its own requirements. The system was designed to a target of -92 dBm RSRP across at least 90 percent of the coverage area for every carrier. RSRF's scope covered the engineering design package, headend and remote equipment, cabling, antenna installation, and commissioning, giving the district a single accountable partner for the deployment.

RSRF engineered an all-carrier active fiber DAS to cover the full two-floor building, including dedicated handling for US Cellular, the carrier behind the district's own phones. The design brought every major carrier into a single system built to a defined coverage target across the school, addressing a building that had strong outdoor signal but no usable service inside.