Howard Community College Turns to MABC Cellular Boosting

The Howard Community College 120-acre campus is located in Columbia, Maryland. Founded in 1966, HCC is a public two-year, post-secondary educational institution serving 22,000 students annually. The college employs approximately 2,600 faculty and staff to provide services to these students.

Offering a wide range of academic programs, HCC prepares students for degrees, certifications, and four-year college transfers. Vocational programs prepare students for immediate employment upon graduation.

HCC’s sprawling, lakeside campus features several academic halls and commons. Other campus facilities include the Science, Engineering, and Technology Building, the dining Galleria and student center, the Physical Education complex, the Library, the Visual and Performing Arts Building, the Health Sciences Building, the Administration Building, and the Visitors Center.

HCC faced several challenges related to its in-building cell signal coverage:

  • Poor connectivity was creating user and stocking issues with LTE-enabled Vending machines deployed across campus and in the Galleria dining space.
  • Spotty coverage was frustrating customers and HCC’s new food service vendor who had rolled out a smartphone app to enable mobile orders intended to ease long queues for service in the Galleria. 
  • HCC provides all staff with smartphones. This benefit is intended as a perk supporting their professional and personal communications, but bad connections were frustrating employees.

HCC had been evaluating Active DAS systems to address these issues until they learned that MABC’s In-Building Cellular solution could offer much better coverage at a significantly lower cost.

The business case to go with MABC was a slam dunk:

  • MABC offered a carrier-agnostic technology that supports Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. DAS arrangements can only support a single carrier.
  • MABC’s 8-week rollout was completed over the slow summer term. DAS can take years to coordinate and deploy.
  • Clinching the deal for MABC were windfall savings. The DAS bids were 4 times the cost of our solution.

During the summer project schedule, donor antennas were deployed on the rooftops of HCC campus buildings and connected to cabling infrastructure and boosters deployed throughout the campus buildings.

The new technology is now reliably connecting HCC’s vending machines, food service apps, and mobile users across campus. When the college needs to deploy a new app or IoT system, they can count on strong cell signals to keep their devices connected.

From the client’s perspective…

“We feel fortunate to have met our MABC account manager earlier this year. The DAS technology we’d been exploring was costly and would be cumbersome to implement. We were intrigued when we learned that MABC could roll out their solution in just 8 weeks. The solution’s ability to support all of the wireless providers made our decision even easier. When we learned how much the college would save, we were willing to implement the solution. Our students and employees now enjoy better service. Partnering with MABC was a great decision.”
 
Mike Heinmuller
Associate VP of Technology Services
Howard Community College
 

Still standing by your office windows? Grappling with IoT devices that need better cellular connections? We can help.

Contact your MABC technology experts today at Portsmouth: (757) 673-2200, Richmond: (804) 273-6500, DC/MD/NOVA: (301) 882.7760 or info@mabc.com.