Crown College eliminated cellular dead zones, then upgraded its entire network
Crown College is a private liberal arts college in St. Bonifacius, Minnesota. Its 200-acre campus of academic buildings, residence halls, a sports stadium, and maintenance facilities serves more than 2,000 students, faculty, and staff.
For years, getting a reliable cellular signal on campus was a problem without a clear solution. Coverage gaps in the main administration building and across other facilities degraded voice calls and data speeds. They also affected E911 location accuracy, which was critical in the event of emergencies.
Years of workarounds
Crown’s IT team attempted to fix the problem by upgrading and adding hardware. But large hardware refreshes and upgrades didn’t close the coverage gaps. Most of the team’s time went to troubleshooting issues across carriers and vendors. Meanwhile, the main building’s IDF had become a tangle of mixed hardware and cabling that created space, safety, and maintenance risks.
Any new solution also had to work within their overall budget. Crown College sought long-term cost predictability, as the college had already invested six figures in hardware and software licenses that it didn’t want to write off as a loss. Meanwhile, poor cellular service was impacting students’ learning and quality of life, as well as day-to-day campus operations.
One stack for all major US carriers
Meter deployed its neutral-host MORAN cellular solution that provides service from all three major US carriers by default. Unlike a traditional distributed antenna system (DAS), Meter’s solution required no new coax, additional construction, or a dedicated room for headend equipment.
Meter led the deployment end to end: network design, surveys, installation, cabling and rack work, configuration, testing, E911 verification, and ongoing monitoring with carriers. Matrix NDI ran the site surveys that made a clean, efficient install possible, while Meter took on labeling and testing cable, reorganizing racks, and removing e-waste, so Crown ended up with a safer, more manageable closet.
Measurable results in the first week
Within six months from contract signature, Crown transformed its campus-wide indoor cellular coverage and performance. In the first week after go-live, the network handled more than 1,600 calls. Throughput has increased 10x, and signal strength and quality tests showed meaningful improvement.
Meter’s subscription includes monitoring issues with carriers, proactive support, and lifecycle management, helping Crown avoid unplanned capital spikes and simplify budgeting. The hardware buyback program addressed the college’s concerns about sunk costs.
From cellular to the whole campus
Cellular was just the beginning. While evaluating Meter Cellular, Crown discovered it could refresh its wired and wireless network on the same platform. It then migrated its entire 310,000-square-foot campus network to Meter. Now Crown gets cellular, network, and internet from one provider, with no separate carriers or vendors to manage.