How to Make a Standardized Tower Top

Picture this: you are tasked with building a wireless network across a country for an operator. You need this network to support current 2G and 3G technologies, but also be ready for 4G and beyond. Here's the problem, though. To have the capabilities in place to be ready for future technologies, you need to deploy remote radio units at the tower top and fiber feeder cable on the towers. But very few of the local installers have experience with this infrastructure. And you know that putting connectors on fiber and installing remote radio units is sensitive to errors. What do you do to get the job done right?

Here's what we already are doing at CommScope for one of the world's leading operators to meet such a challenge. We start with a 10-port multiband antenna that can handle an extremely wide range of frequency bands. This antenna will support air-interface technologies now and in the future. We mount that antenna on a pre-fabricated mounting piece, adding remote radio units and the fiber junction box behind it. We pre-wire the fiber tail connections from the junction box to the RRUs and the RF cable assemblies to the antenna. We do all this in a factory and pre-test the solution for PIM performance and other metrics.

Additionally, we supply a single pre-terminated, hybrid power and fiber optic trunk cable for this unit. To ensure customers order the right materials including the right hybrid fiber cable lengths, we will conduct site audits that produce a complete bill of materials. All of this leads to a pre-assembled, pre-tested tower top solution that you can hoist up the tower in one piece and connect with a single pre-terminated, hybrid fiber and power cable, ordered to length based on our site audit.

Not bad, right? That's why I am excited to be involved in expanding our Andrew SiteRise capabilities. That's the brand name we have for this solution, which you can learn more about in this video. Do you have any questions about the Andrew SiteRise solution?