O2 UK Claims to Deploy Europe’s First Pre-Assembled Mobile Network Mast
Mobile operator O2 (Virgin Media) has today worked with Vecta Labs to deploy “Europe’s first pre-assembled mobile mast” at a site in Sandwich, Kent (England) – taking only 4 hours to complete, which compares with the usual 2 days. Such an approach could speed up the roll-out of new mobile broadband (4G, 5G etc.) infrastructure, reduce deployment costs and cut downtime.
Deploying a new mobile mast often requires a lot of connections and configurations to be made on-site for various antennas, radios and cabling (potentially hundreds of connections for a single site, but this does vary). Frequently this also has to be done by engineers working at height and exposed to the elements, which can make for quite a slow and complex process.
The new approach attempts to improve this by pre-assembling the components of the mast in a controlled factory environment and then putting those through comprehensive testing, including simulated wind conditions and signal quality testing (inside anechoic chambers). All of this comes before they are installed at the site, “dramatically simplifying installation while improving quality control“.
Advertisement
The site deployment successfully reduced the number of connections engineers must complete on site from around 100 cables to just 6, which naturally makes a huge difference.
Steven Verigotta, O2’s Director of Mobile Delivery, said:
“Moving one of the most complex parts of building a mobile mast into the factory is a real step forward for our network. It allows us to install sites faster, improve quality control and ensure customers benefit from stronger, more reliable connectivity from the moment the site goes live. This is just one of the improvements we’re making as part of our £700m Mobile Transformation Plan which is helping to create the biggest and most reliable network in the UK.”
The work is said to form part of VMO2’s ongoing £700m Mobile Transformation Plan.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
Advertisement
Leave a Reply
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message and display names can be almost anything you like (provided they do not contain offensive language or impersonate a real person's legal name). By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
Picture please.
The picture on the article is all we’ve been given, but ultimately the end result just looks like any other deployment.
Probably only a pre-rigged mast delivered to site with the feeders coiled up and ready for connection to the equipment cabinet.
The ground stub for the mast would have to be already buried in the preformed concrete base allowing for the the concrete to cure over 5 days.
If it is a rooftop installation, then time required to crane up the supporting steel work for erection.
Overall – a bit of a non story
Actually I’m rather surprised this isn’t more of the norm already. Pre-assembly, initial alignment and testing of the antennas / cabling (i.e. the mast head assembly) at ground level in a controlled environment makes far more sense to me than doing this assembly work entirely at height.
Admittedly I’m not in the mobile tower industry, but with my engineering hat on from other electronics design/manufacturing industries, this is exactly the approach I’d suggest.
On the face of it the story might appear not to be radical, but small changes to how things are done can sometimes yield large improvements in cost saving and potentially quality too.
As such I think this is a newsworthy story. I’ve learned something from it.
It applies to any manufacturing (or other) industry – if you don’t re-evaluate how you do things with fresh eyes from time to time, you will never realise improvements or cost savings.