According to our most recent Stadium Connectivity Outlook survey, adding wireless capacity is the top initiative for venues in 2025. And when it comes to adding cellular capacity to a venue, one of the most popular methods is by installing a distributed antenna system, or DAS.
Recently, the market for DAS equipment suppliers has seen some radical shakeup, with longtime providers CommScope and Corning selling off their DAS businesses. That disruption may provide some market-share opportunity for another player in the market, Solid, which is making a move back into targeting sports and entertainment venues.
Joining us today on the Stadium Tech Report podcast is Shane Hague, senior vice president of sales and business development for Solid, who will talk about where Solid has been and where it is going from a technology and provider standpoint. With a wide product portfolio and some success stories in complex environments like transportation systems, Solid has a good DAS story to tell, so listen in — only on the Stadium Tech Report podcast!
A quiet participant
Longtime Stadium Tech Report readers may remember that Solid has been involved in the stadium DAS market almost since the beginning. If the name hasn’t surfaced publicly in DAS deals recently, Hague said that may be more due to Solid’s previous marketing strategies.
“We actually have about 30 professional and college sports venues that utilize Solid equipment just in the U.S. and a lot of very successful deployments in Asia and Europe,” Hague said. But Solid’s marketing efforts, Hague added, have been more traditionally been focused on supporting its partners, the carriers, and any third-party operators involved in its deals.
In addition to large public venue DAS builds, Hague said Solid has also been successful recently in the Open RAN space, as well as in providing optical networking solutions, not just in the U.S. but internationally as well. Given the company’s strong business stance and the changing dynamics of the U.S. DAS market, Hague said Solid has made a strategic decision to “make a reinvestment into the sports and entertainment space.”
Changing the thinking on who pays for DAS
For a good part of its history, the market for stadium DAS deployments was one where the brunt of the costs were borne by the wireless carriers, who pay “rent” to participate in a stadium DAS deployment. But Hague, like many others in the industry, has heard the message loud and clear from the top wireless carriers — there is no more “free lunch” in the stadium DAS business, especially for smaller or less-used venues.
“We started hearing in the summer of 2023 that a lot of venue [DAS] projects were stalling out because the prices were too high [for the carriers],” Hague said. “I think the carriers were sending a pretty clear message that they wanted to kind of re-establish where the goal line was.”
What that means going forward, Hague said, is that venue owners should start thinking less of getting something for nothing, and instead expecting to be more of a partner who would share in the overall costs of the project.
“I think it’s probably a good thing for all if we could change the mindset to be one of joint participation,” Hague said. “We’d probably see the overall scale of projects increase as opposed to just the really big ones getting done.”
Learning more about the technology choices
One interesting twist Hague has seen lately is a desire by stadium IT professionals to learn more about the technology coming into their buildings.
“At the SEAT Conference last summer, there seemed to be a new generation of IT and technology folks at the conference,” Hague said. “They seem to have an appetite in learning about the products.” Hague also said that Solid is starting to see RFPs now “that have some very specific technology carve-outs or call-outs that weren’t there before.”
For Hague, new technology developments are a strength for Solid’s pitch, because of the modular and adaptable architecture the company built years ago that is still performing strong today.
“I think we’re the only major OEM that brought forth a product in 2009 and continues that same product forward today,” said Hague of the company’s “Alliance DAS” line.
“The uniqueness about it is it’s modular and scalable,” Hague said. “So when we create an upgrade to it, we make sure it’s backwards compatible. And then the modularity allows you to basically refresh and renew an existing system by changing out amplifiers, frequency bands, and subcomponents that will allow the system to accommodate all the new bands of service.” Such flexibility, he added, is insurance against having to “rip and replace” systems that can’t keep up.
New products on the way, and an O-RAN future
Looking into the near-term crystal ball, Hague said Solid has “more new things cooking on the stove than ever before,” including a new version of its head-end offering that has “the most diverse set of radio options” that will allow venues to greatly reduce the space needed for head-end operations while supporting flexibility for high, medium and low-power needs.
Beyond that Hague said Solid will be actively involved in Open RAN deployments, already having deployed approximately 17,000 radio units to one of the top U.S. carriers. Solid was also the recipient of a $27 million grant from the government to help fund its Open RAN development efforts, which is partly paying for a new team being set up in Dallas, Hague said.
“The short version of what that’s going to do for us is to imagine our next generation DAS headend having an integrated DAS signal source that’s O-RAN based, eliminating the need for that standalone traditional radio signal source,” Hague said. “That’s what the operators are asking us for, to move toward to help modernize and further shrink the cost, the space, the power consumption, and the footprint of a DAS, especially at the head end.”
Solid contact information
Potential customers who are interested in learning more from Solid can contact Hague directly Hague also said Solid has six regional sales directors with six regional solutions engineers who can help with specific product questions.
At the top of the company Hague said people can contact Solid president Scott Deweese, or Slavko Djukic, the company’s vice president for product line management and technology, who Hague said will both be visible and present at multiple industry events and gatherings going forward.
“Grab any of us by the. the shirt sleeve and we’ll get you the right person or we’ll help you ourselves,” Hague said.
How to contact Solid
sales@solid.com – general inquiries
Shane Hague – shane.hague@solid.com – Senior Vice President, Sales and Business Development
Slavko Djukic – Slavko.djukic@solid.com – Vice President Product Line Management & Technology, Americas
Chris Graff – chris.graff@solid.com – Senior Director, U.S. Regional Sales
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