Site owners at busy attractions need to provide cutting edge services to keep visitors coming back time and again. This is especially true for leisure complexes whose young target audiences demand the best and latest services. Xscape offers a range of leisure activities, including cinemas, indoor ski slopes and bowling alleys, as well as shopping and dining areas. The complexes are designed to provide a complete entertainment experience. Needless to say, visitors to Xscape expect to be able to use their mobile telephones at the venue. The first Xscape entertainment destination was built in Milton Keynes in 2003. Achieving mobile phone coverage was a priority from the outset, as Asset Manager Andrew Russell explains: “With an expected average dwell time of up to seven hours, there was no question that visitors to the complex would want to use their mobile phones, whether to locate friends on arrival, or to call someone to pick them up when they’d finished. Not to mention teenagers who would want to send text and picture messages to their friends. Clearly adequate coverage was vital for us.” Capacity was a key issue. The complex includes a number of relaxation areas such as cafes, bars and restaurants where visitors were likely to use more sophisticated 3G services during their downtime, such as online games, email and music downloads. Xscape also wanted to ensure that whichever solution it implemented could be easily upgraded to meet any future advances in communications technology. Our InBuilding system gave Xscape the coverage it needed throughout the 500,000 square feet Milton Keynes site. Because of the size of the complex, we provided an active DAS (Distributed Antenna System) network giving visitors strong, amplified signals, consistent coverage and maximum capacity. And, of course, because we fully understood the changing, innovative nature of mobile telephone technology, our system was designed for full scalability and easy upgrade – indeed the system has since been upgraded to carry 3G traffic. It’s a fully managed proposition. This means that Xscape simply hands over the responsibility for managing and maintaining the system to us, leaving it free to focus on providing its own customers with a great leisure experience. Following the success at Milton Keynes, Xscape decided to use InBuilding for both 2G and 3G traffic at its Castleford complex near Leeds. Andrew Russell explains: “The InBuilding system is now an integral part of our service to visitors, just as mobile phones are an integral part of people’s lives today. Being able to use their phones in the complex enhances the entire entertainment experience.” Twitter LinkedIn YouTube ©2014 Arqiva