When You Can’t Afford NOT to Have Cell Service

Despite being hip and happening and right in the heart of Tempe, AZ, the Tempo Apartments at McClintock Station had a couple problems. Located near Arizona State University and the Tempe Marketplace, these beautiful, contemporary apartments attracted a multitude of students and young, urban types as tenants. Problem #1 was that these students and young urban types were leaving in droves because of poor cell phone coverage. In every one of the six 4-story buildings, the third and fourth floors had some cell coverage but the first and second floors had virtually none.

Problem #2 was the Tempo hadn’t originally budgeted for any cell phone repeater systems so they thought they couldn’t afford to have us remedy Problem #1. But they also knew they couldn’t afford to keep losing tenants at a such a rapid pace.

So they decided to have us start small. They asked us to install a cell phone repeater system in just one of their six 4-story buildings. Here’s where we ran across Problem #3: the hallways of the buildings were “hard lid” — meaning they did not have the convenient lift tile grid. It’s extremely difficult/time consuming to run wires through the ceiling without being able to feed them through an open grid. We solved this by installing a Cel-Fi system which uses a much smaller Cat-5 wire that is easier to run than the garden-hose-sized RG-11 wire used with some of our other systems.

It worked like a charm. As soon as we were finished with the first building, the Tempo was so happy with their cell phone coverage, they scheduled us to come back and do a second building six months later. And a third building six months after that and so on and so on until every building is done.

The Tempo can add “excellent cell service in every apartment” to their long list of upscale amenities!

Check out the Tempo’s gorgeous facilities: The Tempo Apartments.