Thursday School: A Site on the Ground is Worth 2 In Planning? I read – and respond to – many Prior Notifications and press coverage of them. I read – and respond to – many analyst infrastructure reports and churnalism of them. And I see a disconnect. There is a large volume of (coordinated) largely worthless objection to mobile sites for planners to sift through. There are almost never any letters of support. A site close to me was recently approved, with many of the 22 objections the same copy-paste 13 pages long, and me the sole supporter. Ignoring the boiler-plate there are objections to Baseband Cooling Fan noise close to housing, too many cabinets, and ‘contradictory’ complaints that sites are too tall and that they should be shared (a shared site with 2x the antennas needs to be ~3M taller). Planners often listen to this and reject on the premise of over/inappropriate development or failure to prove that site sharing has been investigated and ruled out. And often a 20M application is denied and approved at 17M! Meanwhile journalists – reviewing OpenRAN solutions which would allow 2 MNOs to share radios (and therefore antennas) – bemoan that this would cause vendors to sell less kit, and TowerCos to get less revenues too by reducing occupancy. But if the basebands are then located in pools in an EdgeDC/Baseband Hotel, then there will be 1 or 2 fewer cabinets and no cooling fan noise to trigger complaints. And if a 17m shared site could get approved 99 times out of 100, and a 20m site refused more than half the time, then surely the optimum solution is to get 100 Shared-RU sites deployed (with revenue for both towercos and vendors) than to have less than 50 sites deployed (with higher OpEx for the estates teams and the RF planning teams replanning at 3m less AGL) because perfection is the enemy of good! Perhaps even compact solutions with limited physical capacity like the one below are viable with just a couple of tri-band RRUs shared between 2 MNOs? #EveryDaysaSchoolDay #Mobile 🤳🏼 #Telecommunications #Planning
Stephen Patrick
1mo
Interesting! #CableFree can do this in one pole, no bulges. Supports up to 4 radios in the pole, any bands - and multi operators. Cooling is silent. Innovative radio design fits inside the pole! Can be colour matched to any environment. Many options available. Can also support C_RAN/O-RAN if centralised BBU or DU/CU are preferred
Dean Bubley
1mo
Worth noting there’s a big difference between a towerco with a site alongside an interstate highway in Montana vs a rooftop in Monaco vs. a monopole in Medway
Akram T.
3w
Check N3RU OD supports 8 bands, multi operators, low power, with external antennas from BTI WIRELESS.
James Lockwood
1mo
I'd wonder that at a time when MNO's are reducing OPEX then they wouldn't want to pay a towerco an OPEX payment to use their tower when the MNOs own CAPEX payment will give them their own structure with no further OPEX payments
Amrit Heer
1mo
Very innovative idea
Martins Mbimba
1mo
Very good
Kevin Mitchell
1mo
Interesting !
Global Lead - RAN Systems Architect 5G at Dell Technologies
1moTowerCo’s - having v been created by NNOs to move assets off books and inject cash, now also need to show the financial community growth… to varying degrees they all seem to be evaluating a move “up stack” to offer more to MBOs than just steel & concrete. Many are investigating ORAN with MORAN as a way of doing this whilst at the same time using the more central sites used by CU and Near-RT RIC/x.App hosting as a way to offer edge clouds for UPF and low latency app hosting.