Figuring out mmWave: Covering indoors and outdoors
Posted on November 6, 2020 by Pivotal Commware
Last fall at Mobile World Congress Los Angeles 2019, mmWave repeater company Pivotal Commware — which has done extensive testing with Verizon and is now shipping its products at scale — showed off a demo in which its equipment took a mmWave signal from outdoors into a hotel conference room. From there, they moved the device into a closet behind another wall and closed the door – and still registered near-gigabit speeds.
“That initial barrier, as you transition from outdoors to indoors, is the biggest obstacle, quite literally,” said Mersad Cavcic, VP of product management for Pivotal Commware. “The majority of the signal attenuation is going to come from it.”
One of Pivotal’s favorite testing environments, Cavcic said, is a two-bedroom apartment. Outdoor-in mmWave coverage is about 10-15% of the apartment and only along the outside wall, but with Pivotal’s repeater, that jumps to 95%+ he said. “The only place where we weren’t able to show mmWave coverage and gigabit-per-second speed was in the shower, in the tub itself” when a person would be surrounded by ceramic tile, Cavcic said.
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