Royal Canin: All-Carrier Active Fiber DAS for a New Manufacturing Plant

Royal Canin, a division of Mars Petcare, is a global leader in pet health nutrition. Its facility in Lewisburg, Ohio is a new, large-scale manufacturing plant spanning 412,517 square feet. The company had already implemented in-building cellular coverage at a sister site and wanted the same capability at Lewisburg, treating reliable connectivity as core infrastructure for a modern production facility rather than an afterthought.

Royal Canin required consistent in-building coverage across the full facility to support office staff, plant operations, and the visiting vendors who move through a working manufacturing site. Coverage also mattered for safety, ensuring that calls, including emergency calls, would connect reliably anywhere in the building. The plant operates with a sizable on-site population at any given time, so the system needed to handle real capacity, not just provide a few bars in the lobby. Relying on the outside macro network was not viable for a building of this size and construction, and Royal Canin wanted a single partner to engineer coverage for the entire plant and coordinate signal for all three carriers.

Manufacturing facilities are demanding RF environments. The scale of the building, combined with the metal-heavy construction, racking, and production equipment common to a plant of this type, absorbs and reflects cellular signal and creates dead zones that a single outside source cannot reach. Coverage had to extend uniformly across a large footprint while supporting the concurrent capacity of the plant's full on-site workforce. The system also had to be engineered to exceed minimum performance thresholds across the covered area, so that coverage held up reliably for both routine and emergency use throughout the facility.

RSRF designed and deployed an active fiber Distributed Antenna System built on ADRF ADXV Series equipment. Active fiber was the right fit for the facility's scale: head-end equipment was centralized in the main data frame room, with signal distributed over single-mode fiber to remote units across the building, then converted to high-power RF for the in-building antennas.

Signal was sourced off-air, using bi-directional channelized amplifiers fed by rooftop donor antennas to bring in and rebroadcast AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Combining all three carriers at the head end gave Royal Canin a single coordinated system rather than separate workstreams per carrier. The design supported LTE and 5G NR and was engineered to exceed the minimum RSRP threshold across the covered area, with antennas placed to push coverage uniformly across the production floor and office spaces.

RSRF delivered an off-air active fiber DAS covering Royal Canin's full Lewisburg plant, bringing dependable AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile coverage to office areas and the production floor alike. The system was engineered to handle the plant's on-site capacity and to support reliable connectivity for staff, visiting vendors, and emergency communications throughout the building. Post-installation, RSRF's Network Operations Center provides ongoing monitoring, maintenance, and support under a multi-year service agreement.