Healthcare is undergoing a significant digital transformation. In 2023, the global digital transformation in healthcare market was valued at $65.2 billion, with projections indicating substantial growth in the coming years. This surge is driven by the increasing adoption of wireless communication technologies, such as wearable devices, mobile health apps, and telemedicine, which enable real-time patient monitoring and improved patient engagement.
As healthcare systems expand beyond traditional hospital settings to include outpatient clinics, ambulatory centers, and remote care facilities, the demand for robust, scalable, and intelligent connectivity solutions becomes paramount. Traditional Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) often fall short in meeting these evolving needs due to their high costs, limited scalability and longtime duration for the project to complete. In contrast, modern solutions like Celona's neutral host architecture offer a more adaptable and cost-effective approach, enabling CIOs to enhance patient outcomes through improved digital infrastructure.
Healthcare delivery no longer lives solely inside the walls of a hospital. From large academic medical centers and trauma hospitals to community clinics, cancer centers, ambulatory surgery sites, and administrative offices, the modern health system is a distributed network of care. Each building has unique connectivity needs - but DAS treats them all the same: as large, centralized sites that warrant costly infrastructure, specialized RF engineering, and months of planning per site.
That model is broken. And many healthcare IT leaders know it.
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DAS can’t keep up with the healthcare network footprint
DAS was originally designed for high-capacity public venues like stadiums. It's expensive, bulky, and demands
- Dedicated fiber/coax to every remote antenna
- Rackspace, cooling, and power in every building
- Lengthy coordination with cellular carriers
This might be justifiable in a flagship hospital—but what about a 10,000 sq ft specialty clinic or outpatient imaging center?
It’s not. Smaller buildings often get left behind, with poor cellular coverage impacting both staff communication and patient experience. Deploying DAS at scale across an entire health system isn’t just cost-prohibitive - it’s logistically impossible.
That’s where Celona changes the game.
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Celona: Scalable cellular for every corner of the health system
Celona's neutral host architecture uses compact, cloud-managed cellular access points that plug into the existing enterprise LAN. No coax. No new fiber. No carrier-provided base stations. Just rapid, scalable deployment across all building types - from a major academic hospital to a rural primary care clinic.
- Deployable in clinics as small as 5-10k sq ft just like Wi-Fi access points
- Uses existing PoE switches and cabling
- No rackspace needed in IDFs and MDFs
- Install and activate in weeks, not quarter
It’s the first cellular solution that truly scales down, so no site is left behind.
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From coverage to capacity: Meeting the demands of modern care
Healthcare’s wireless needs don’t stop at connectivity - they extend to capacity, quality of service, and reliability at the point of care. DAS delivers a uniform blanket of signal, often failing to prioritize where capacity is actually needed.
Imagine a cardiac ICU where:
- Every bed has telemetry streaming to clinical dashboards
- Nurses use mobile tablets for rounding
- AI-assisted cameras monitor vitals and mobility
- Virtual family visits run via video apps
A blanket signal isn't enough. Capacity must be concentrated at the bedside.
Each Celona AP is a full-fledged micro base station that delivers:
- High throughput exactly where users are
- Support for dense device environments
- Celona MicroSlicing for deterministic QoS - so clinical telemetry, video calls, and voice remain prioritized, even during peak usage
Unlike DAS, which centralizes capacity, Celona brings compute and quality to the network edge - closer to patients, clinicians, and the care experience.
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Full visibility and control - Finally
Traditional DAS gives hospitals little to no visibility into the network they pay to deploy. Carriers own the signal, control the performance, and keep the analytics. IT teams can’t see what’s happening - or worse, can’t troubleshoot when there’s a problem.
Celona flips this model by giving healthcare IT teams full access to:
- Real-time user metrics (voice, data, device activity)
- Network health (throughput, latency, dropped sessions)
- Application-level visibility and control (QoS policies, alerts
With Celona’s cloud-based Orchestrator, hospitals can finally monitor and optimize their own indoor cellular experience.
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More than cost savings - It’s infrastructure that adapts for clinical care
Yes, Celona reduces TCO by 40–60% over DAS by eliminating coax runs, basestation installs, and carrier negotiations. But the real value lies inflexibility:
- Need to cover a new outpatient surgery center? Plug in APs.
- Expanding to a leased floor in a medical office building? Use the Ethernet already there.
- Rolling out to a new remote patient monitoring app? Prioritize traffic with MicroSlicing.
This is how modern networks should behave - software-defined, user-aware, and infinitely scalable.
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Final word
DAS isn’t built for healthcare. Not today’s healthcare. Not the distributed, digital-first, data-rich reality of patient care.
Celona’s neutral host solution is built for where healthcare is going:
- Flexible enough for a rural clinic
- Powerful enough for a Level I trauma center
- Smart enough to prioritize mission-critical apps
- Simple enough to deploy in days
It's time to stop thinking of cellular coverage as an infrastructure headache and start treating it as a strategic enabler of better care.
The future of healthcare doesn’t run on DAS. It runs on Celona. Explore full strength cellular connectivity right inside your healthcare facility.
