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Bridgewest’s West Australian pharmaceutical manufacturing facility spans over 34,000m2. Originally set up as a TGA-licensed, University of Adelaide spinoff, producing specialised oncology products and sterile injectables, locally for Australia as well as exporting to 100 overseas countries.

ICT Group, who are contracted to manage Bridgewest’s IT and Telephony requirements for the facility, brought the Bentley Park location to Powertec’s attention as a potential candidate for mobile coverage improvement. At the time, options within the Australian market were somewhat limited due to regulations & costings – because of this, the best solution at the time was clustering CEL-FI GO’s to provide multicarrier signal repeating across the site.

The Issue

Coverage throughout the facility was generally poor with less than 1 bar displayed in most locations and many areas with no coverage at all. The facility is massive, and Bridgewest staff were unable to communicate reliably via mobile phones which presented several concerns for the business and its staff. Bridgewest knew this needed to be addressed & turned to their trusted partner ICT Group for further guidance. ICT Group then consulted with Powertec & Telstra in order to develop a strategy to provide an affordable, long-term solution to appease the businesses communication needs. Upon investigation of the issue, it became apparent that the primary cause for their woes was due to the buildings structure itself, which was originally designed and built in 1982 and extended several times – mobile phone signal was certainly not a consideration during those days!
 

Challenges

With ample external coverage present & clear Line of Site back to the macro towers, the primary challenge for this installation was predominantly the sheer size of the building. Due to the amount of metal and electronics in the building, the installation required complex design methods, which resulted in considerabily more service antennas than a premise of similar size.

Product Solution 
An In-Building Coverage (IBC) solution was implemented, installing 7 multicarrier systems for a total of 21 Nextivity G41 repeaters (7 each allocated to Telstra, Opus and Vodafone). As the facility was very densely populated with many various rooms & functions, it favoured having segmented systems to provide coverage rather than a singular, wide-spread system.

• Off Air Repeater System – Nextivity Clustered G41s
• Donor antennas - Powertec Wideband Grid Antenna
• Internal domes - Powertec Ceiling Dome Antenna
• RF Components – CommScope, Powertec
• Roof Masts – APAC Infrastructure Galvanised Collared Roof Mast

 
Outcome

Jason Rowland, the General Manager of Sales and Solutions at iCT Group, said that working with Powertec, we were able to resolve a longstanding mobile coverage issue for our client. This solution increased the productivity of staff and other stakeholders throughout the WA facility.