Music in the Air: SPINNER MNCS^© Providing Mobile Connectivity at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg

The recently inaugurated Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany has quickly acquired an outstanding global reputation, and for good reason. In addition to harboring one of the world’s most advanced concert halls with unmatched acoustics, it also sports a striking architecture.

SPINNER Elbphilharmonie SPINNER MNCS in ElbphilharmonieThe concert hall is acoustically and mechanically isolated from the rest of the building, and its exteriors are designed to block all radio signals. But because the structure also integrates apartments, a hotel and a public area, the only way to enable mobile communications inside was to install an in-building solution. There are several thousands of visitors a day, who send countless photographs and videos and generate huge data volumes that have to be managed somehow. This called for a first-class solution, so those in charge naturally opted for the SPINNER Mobile Network Combining System – MNCS^©.

The SPINNER MNCS^© is a customizable in-building solution that can be precisely tailored to meet operators’ requirements. The system crafted for the Elbphilharmonie bundles four mobile communication bands of each of three operators and routes them across three sectors to a distributed antenna system (DAS). Since some of the carrier frequencies are very close together, excellent filtering is a must to prevent passive intermodulation from causing adjacent-channel interference. The advantages of this setup are clear: the operators can share a single combining system and realize considerable cost savings as a result. The system’s ultralow susceptibility to interference also maximizes use of the available bandwidth.

SPINNER components also take care of distributing the signals. The SPINNER splitters and tappers deployed also excel with minimal passive intermodulation. The distribution system is thus also practically interference-proof, allowing full use of the available bandwidth.

“The SPINNER MNCS^© system has already yielded outstanding results in many of our projects,” says Hans Rolf Lopau of Deutsche Telekom AG, who is responsible for the technical side of the project. “We simply submit our specifications, and SPINNER very quickly builds a tailored, perfectly calibrated system that optimally meets our requirements. The carriers are very effectively isolated from one another, and the passive intermodulation is negligible. Plus, the SPINNER MNCS^© gives us flexibility for later extensions.”

There are already plans to add more LTE mobile communication bands. The MNCS^© system’s modularity means smooth integration of required components and long-term reliability moving forward.