Royal Mail deliver letters and parcels across the UK and around the world. Royal Mail’s Mount Pleasant and Farringdon Road Sorting Offices were experiencing poor cellular coverage despite the central location of the Royal Mail buildings, impacting the safety of staff and visitors.
Mount Pleasant Mail Centre is operated by Royal Mail and is one of the largest sorting offices in the world. It is located in the London Borough of Islington, on the boundary with the London Borough of Camden. Just round the corner is the 5-storey Main Office building on Farringdon Road.
The Problem
With a total size of 250,000ft, both Royal Mail buildings had very poor internal mobile coverage throughout. The staff all rely on the BT & EE Network and the lack of reliable signal was proving to be problematic in making and receiving phone calls internally. This was having a direct impact on internal communications, site operations and was a potential risk to staff and visitor safety.
Aware of the problem, Royal Mail set about finding a solution to provide adequate mobile coverage for the scale of the building.
The Solution
Frequency, in partnership with their channel partner Simoco Wireless, were asked to supply, install and commission a solution. Cel-Fi signal boosters were proposed as a legal, quick to deploy and cost-effective solution to resolving coverage issues building wide.
With access to the site plans and consultative sessions where an in-depth understanding of the requirements was gained, a proposed outline, including budget costs for Cel-Fi Quatra solution, was put forward subject to site survey. However, it is important for buildings of this size and structure that a site survey be carried out to further refine and develop the design.
Zonewave, one of Frequency’s enlisted Cel-Fi certified installation partners, were commissioned to carry out the site survey of both buildings. A survey was carried out to determine how much of the existing cabling infrastructure could be utilized for a Cel-Fi Quatra install and where equipment would need to be installed to give the required coverage throughout.
Installation
Armed with all information from the survey, the proposal to Royal Mail recommended Quatra was the only feasible solution to deliver a resilient and robust solution to enhance the EE mobile signal due to the sheer size, layout and complexity of each building. The Cel-Fi Quatra installation consisted of 9 x Quatra NU, 36 x Quatra CU and 3 x external MIMO antennas spread throughout the building, with the external antennas mounted on the roof.
The Results
The installation was completed by ZoneWave within 3 weeks, resulting in previously poor coverage areas now boasting full EE coverage, allowing both staff and visitors to use their mobile devices and communicate more effectively.
