Dali Wireless unveils Matrix Public Safety indoor-coverage platform that supports P25, TETRA and LTE

However, building owners trying to address the indoor-communications needs for both commercial and public-safety users can benefit significantly by coordinating the deployment, Spedaliere said.

“I absolutely believe in putting two parallel systems in,” he said. “Even though the systems would look very similar structurally, you would save a tremendous amount of labor putting them in.”

Many building owners provide indoor public-safety coverage primarily to meet a government mandate. For those building owners that simply are seeking an alternative with the lowest upfront cost, the t-series platform remains the best option offered by Dali Wireless, Spedaliere said.

However, if a building owner wants to future-proof indoor coverage for a facility in a manner that allows new bands and protocols to be added to the system for little cost by adding modules, the Matrix PS platform likely will be more attractive, Spedaliere said.

“There is a premium [in cost for deploying the Matrix PS instead of the t-series PS], but it’s not a huge premium,” he said.

“The idea was to try to make it as flexible as possible, looking at all the technologies today but be able to expand it and move forward with it.

Initial versions of the Matrix PS will support 10 GB/s speeds, but it can be adapted to provide data throughputs of more than 100 GB/s, Spedaliere said.

Such flexibility should make the Matrix PS offering appealing to those seeking an indoor-coverage solution, according to Nick Marshall, Research director at ABI Research.

“The evolution to LTE-based public safety from the current narrowband systems will happen gradually,” Marshall said in a prepared statement. “The requirements placed on next-gen public-safety solutions demand that it is not only scalable, but also offers high availability and high reliability critical for first responders to communicate and do their jobs optimally.

“The solution must be able to support the needs of newer buildings, venues, and other service areas, and to be future-ready, so that it can seamlessly adapt to newer bands and protocols. Dali Matrix PS offers an economical alternative to traditional RF-over-fiber DAS and BDAs in terms of scalability, flexibility and TCO [total cost of ownership].”

Spedaliere said various components of the Matrix PS platform will be released throughout 2016, and the entire solution should be generally available by the end of the year.