Indoor mobile infrastructure has no standard price, because the cost is driven almost entirely by the building: its size, construction, layout and how much capacity the people and systems inside it need. What can be said generally is that the way it is paid for has changed. A decade ago, in-building coverage meant a large capital project funded by the property owner or, occasionally, an operator. Today it is increasingly delivered as a building service against a monthly fee, with a specialist provider funding, installing and operating the system. That shift matters more to most owners than the headline number, because it changes who carries the risk, who handles the operators, and what happens when the technology moves on.
Why there is no price list
Two buildings of the same floor area can need very different systems. A dense office tower with thousands of daily users needs far more capacity than a logistics facility of the same size with fifty people and a fleet of scanners. Construction matters as much as scale: a concrete-core high-rise with basements and lift shafts requires more radio units in more difficult places than an open-plan campus building. The number of floors, the ceiling voids available for cabling, whether installation happens during construction or in a fully let building, and the level of service the owner wants in stairwells, car parks and lifts all move the figure. Anyone quoting a price per square metre without having seen the building is guessing, and the guess flatters whatever they are selling.
The old model: coverage as a capital project
The traditional route was a distributed antenna system bought by the property owner as a one-off capital investment. The owner paid for design and installation, then discovered the less visible costs: agreements had to be negotiated with each mobile operator separately to get their signal into the system, the equipment needed periodic upgrades as networks evolved, and because passive systems cannot be remotely monitored, faults tended to announce themselves through tenant complaints rather than alerts. The capital outlay was substantial, but the ongoing burden of owning telecoms equipment in a property portfolio was what wore owners down. We have covered why mobile signal fails inside modern buildings elsewhere; the point here is that fixing it this way made the owner an accidental telecoms operator.
The service model: coverage as a building service
The model gaining ground across Europe treats indoor mobile coverage the way buildings already treat lifts, security or waste: as a service with a monthly fee. A specialist infrastructure provider funds and installs the system, operates and monitors it around the clock, manages every operator relationship, and keeps the technology current over the life of the agreement. For the owner, the upfront capital cost becomes a predictable operating cost, one agreement replaces many, and responsibility for performance sits with a party contractually bound to deliver it. This is the model Proptivity operates: the building gets shared infrastructure serving all operators, and the owner gets a single supplier accountable for the result.
The service fee itself varies with the same drivers as any build: the capacity tier the building needs, the coverage scope (whether basements, car parks and lifts are included), and the complexity of the property. A fee model also changes the conversation about upgrades. When 5G capability, new frequency bands or additional capacity arrive, they are the provider’s problem to deliver within the service, not a new capital request landing on the owner’s desk.
Who pays, and why it ended up this way
It is reasonable to ask why mobile operators do not simply pay for coverage inside buildings, since it is their customers who benefit. The arithmetic answers the question: there are hundreds of thousands of commercial buildings in Europe, and no operator can fund dedicated systems in more than a handful of the very largest venues, and only for its own subscribers when it does. Meanwhile the value of good indoor coverage has been accruing to the building: it shows up in tenant satisfaction, in leasing conversations, in connectivity certifications such as WiredScore, and in the growing list of building systems that depend on mobile connectivity. Where value lands, funding follows, which is why indoor coverage is settling into the same category as other property infrastructure, provided by the building because the building is what benefits, with shared systems keeping the cost far below what operator-by-operator installations would ever have allowed.
How to think about the budget
The useful comparison is not against doing nothing, which costs nothing until it costs a tenancy, but against the other services a building already buys. A monthly connectivity fee sits alongside cleaning, security and maintenance as part of running a competitive property, and unlike most line items it is visible to every visitor within seconds of arriving. The cost of the alternative is harder to see on a spreadsheet but shows up in leasing friction, in complaints that consume management time, and in buildings that quietly fail the connectivity checks that certification schemes and discerning tenants now run before signing.
Getting a number for your building
Since the honest answer to the cost question is that it depends on the building, the practical next step is to let the building answer. Our free coverage check uses real-world mobile measurement data for your address, and our team prepares a full indoor coverage assessment at no cost and with no obligation, which is also the point at which a specific building gets a specific commercial answer rather than a market generality.