A leading wireless base station provider has urged mobile operators to push forward with sharing equipment and cell-site infrastructure. 

Peter Jackson, director in Europe for Communications Components Inc (CCI), says cell-site sharing is better for the environmental impact and improves the performance of all parties competing for bandwidth. 

“Sharing cell-site infrastructure in todays competitive and crowded mobile environment must be increasingly accepted as standard practice by operators, if they are to reduce unnecessary costs and obtain optimum capacity and coverage levels over which to deliver the high-value content and services that, today, form their core, revenue-generating activities,” says Jackson. 

“As wireless networks continue to grow, greater daily demand for services has increased the pressure on cell sites to deliver more in terms of capacity and coverage. In turn, site running costs have risen and one obvious way to defray these costs is by sharing key network infrastructure. In some cases, this enables operators to decommission existing cell sites to avoid unnecessary duplication of coverage, which, in turn, leads to huge savings.”

According to Jackson, efficient equipment sharing – not simply sharing a tower – will deliver increased site capabilities without impacting network performance. By using equipment such as low-loss combiners and multiplexers, capital expenditure and overall operating expenditure will be significantly reduced. It also enables the addition of new technologies such as LTE, without compromising network quality.