- Nextivity provides distributed antennas, cellular signal boosting and private networking
- The company looks to provide systems to cover 1,000 to 700,000-square-foot areas.
- The company sells to retailers, data centers and the K-12 school system
Boosting 4G and 5G signals indoors, as well as identifying sounds in a space, is a growing area in the cellular arena. There is plenty of cross-over between distributed antennas, private networking and even cellular signal boosting.
Some of the major players in the distributed antenna systems (DAS) include JMA Wireless, Cobham and Corning, as well as operators such as AT&T. Nextivity is a San Diego-based company that provides cellular signal boosters, off-air coverage systems, as well as private networking apparatus.
“If you look at Nextivity, our primary focus is like that 1,000-square-foot up to 600- or 700- thousand square-foot facility,” Stephen Kowal chief commercial officer at Nextivity, told Fierce. “We use the power of the macro network, we capture that, rebroadcast it into the building and then we do the coordination in and out.”
The company offers 700 and 800 MHz public safety radios, high power user equipment and 4G private networking equipment - “we call it Harmony,” Kowal noted. “We provide the small cell, the SASE [secure access service edge] server and the EPC [evolved packet core] to get it up and running.”
“Our big verticals are large box retailers ... [as well as] warehouses and data centers, large areas that need cellular coverage but not a whole bunch of capacity,” Kowal said. “The other area we do really, really well in is the K through 12 school districts. They require public safety ... they have a need for DAS [distributed antenna systems] ... and we have a very unique DAS offering in the United States where we can do DAS, Zigbee and gunshot detection.”
Kowal said that Nextivity is now using an artificial intelligence (AI) chip inside of its smart antenna that - with the microphone - enables the system to listen for abnormal sounds and gunshots. Kowal noted that this can help inform emergency services of what body armor they might need to wear depending if the shots fired are pistol shots or rifle shots.
There are still some questions on how accurate AI-powered gunshot detection systems are. Some level of knowledge is probably better than flying blind in these situations, however.
The global DAS market size was valued at $8,392.4 million in 2023 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.3% from 2024 to 2030, according to a Grand View Research report.