Poor mobile phone coverage in a shopping center and a solution.

Why is there often poor mobile phone coverage in your shopping centre?

Have you noticed poor mobile phone coverage in large shopping centres in your area? The reason is, many such shopping centres are clad in steel panels, and have very few windows. Radio waves can’t penetrate steel panels. They act as a Faraday cage.

Its very important to be contactable in the shopping centre.

However, people do need to use their mobile phones in shopping centres. For the customers, shopping can be recreational. Being in contact with each other, browsing the internet etc is part of the shopping experience. For the employees, it can be very important to be contactable. Many employees are juggling work with home duties, and being contactable in an emergency can be very important (anyone with children of school going age will have experienced this).

Because there are so many people in a shopping centre, it is certain that phones from all the mobile phone operators will be operational. Therefore, any solution to the poor coverage problem will have to cover all mobile operators. It is not feasible to require people to sign up to a service or to have to use a password. The service will have to operate smoothly as any customer moves from outside the shopping centre to inside.

A solution to fix your poor mobile phone coverage problem

One good solution to this problem is a broadband mobile phone repeater. This takes the strong mobile phone signals from outside the shopping centre, amplifies them and re-transmits the stronger signals indoors using indoor antennas. The outdoor antenna can be placed on the roof of the shopping centre. This is a good position to place such an antenna as roofs of shopping centres tend to be high, and therefore receive good strong mobile phone signals.

As shopping centres are usually large buildings, with one anchor tenant and many smaller retail outlets indoors, it will probably be necessary to have several indoor antennas. Stelladoradus manufactures a very suitable amplifier. It caters for 4 indoor antennas. Depending on the outdoor signal strength and where the 4 indoor antennas are located, this can cover up to 4000 sq meters. If more than 4 indoor antennas are required, splitters can be used to split the signal, and more indoor antennas can be used. Alternatively, a second or even third amplifier can be used.