Comment by kurthr
Ok, so this is the final commercial design. It's inside the window. You can see the electrodes on the small glass sheet (100cm x 25cm?). There are 8 coax connections to 8 patch antennas. They don't cover the entire window and since I can see them they aren't very transparent (that's pretty normal for off angle low resistance ITO since you can't easily match the index shifts with AR films). The antennas aren't very big (why would they be for GHz+ frequencies) and they still have to go through the windows.
I don't know that a white box on the inside of the same window (which covered the wired coax connections) would be that much more conspicuous, especially from the outside. Maybe they require special exterior windows, but those don't seem to be part of the very visible "transparent" antennas. If you lowered the drop ceiling anything would be less conspicuous on the inside.
> If you lowered the drop ceiling anything would be less conspicuous on the inside.
The product is for fitting into existing buildings, with minimal impact. Being inconspicuous is a secondary concern, it only needs to be inconspicuous enough to not be obvious. Drop the ceiling on an entire floor to hide would not be low impact.
As to a plastic white box, sure you could do that. But it would be a plastic box that contains some kind of antenna on a rigid substrate. At which point you might as well just use glass as the substrate, and get rid of the extra enclosure, and manufacturing fiddlyness involved in assembly.
The cost of a glass antenna vs one housed in a plastic box is going to be negligible compared to overall cost of the installed equipment. At that point you might as well just use glass, simplify the construction and install process, and get a product that’s less visually distracting as a bonus.