Woman's battles poor cell service at new facility

Published Aug 14, 2012 at 3:00 pm (Updated Aug 14, 2012)

While the sleek, new $327 million Woman's Hospital on Airline Highway is a state-of-the-art facility, it has a problem: There's virtually no cell service inside the building. Doctors and patients tell Daily Report they've been frustrated by an inability to use cell phones and other mobile devices inside the 500,000-square-foot hospital. Woman's administrators are frustrated, too. They say they contacted AT&T—the predominant provider of cell service by the hospital's employees and physicians—regarding concerns about the adequacy of cell phone service at the new campus last year. At that time, an additional tower was requested, but AT&T responded that it could only provide the hospital with a base station—and not until the end of January 2013, says Paul Kirk, the hospital's vice president of information technology. In the meantime, Woman's has purchased an antenna system to be installed by mid-October at a cost of $500,000, which will provide coverage for AT&T, Sprint and Verizon throughout the entire campus. The hospital has also distributed pagers to physicians to maintain communication with one another and with families of patients. An AT&T spokesperson was not able to provide comment before this afternoon's deadline. —Stephanie Riegel