Network Build

Connect44 Design Centres of Excellence operate from Spain, Poland and Germany.

These core offices support a "boots-on-the-ground" presence of Project Managers and Surveyors in all our country’s Business Units (BU) and reach into many of their neighbouring countries when required.

Our design services cover all requirements in the end-to-end site processes and lifecycle of telecoms infrastructure, from feasibility studies through to operational support and aged-site infrastructure condition reporting.

We operate continuous improvement and embedded quality processes to ensure our design teams have the latest best practice and knowledge transfer across all our country operations and we produce outstanding quality outcomes for our customers.

All our design instructions are managed and controlled by a workflow and project management tool, designed in-house, which manages design processes, SLAs, resources, tracking, reporting and invoicing; seamlessly. Your instructions are always under control and status reports available at any time.

Connect44 Planning and Design project managers and designers support acquisition services through feasibility surveys and reports, acquisition support artefacts, such as 360º panoramic images and general arrangement drawings. More in-depth surveys and reports include EMF/ICNIRP assessments and evidence reports/technical assessment drawings.

Our engineers can attend site unaccompanied for survey visits, or can join a customer’s joint site visit to complete the design/planning with the customer’s other dependency providers such as transmission engineers, RAN engineers, site acquisition agents, etc.

Our design project managers also manage in-depth planning reports and submissions to local authorities/municipalities and liaison where a more in-depth justification for a site solution is required.

Connect44 offers a range of survey services to manage all aspects of site and network Design, Build and Operate.

Connect44’s Planning and design department has more than one hundred design engineers and project managers, the majority of whom are certified to work at height. This creates flexibility, efficiency and the ability to manage change. Working effectively. Cutting costs.

All of our Business Units possess drone imaging capability, through their in-country partners or through our Drone Academy Centre of Excellence. The type of drone depends on the application from a 15Kg heavy lifter to a 60 Mega-pixel hi-res imager; drones are utilised for all variations of survey including data capture for our 3D modelling and 3D environment capability.

In-country local engineer/surveyors and drone pilots complete design surveys; the engineers in our core design functions then create site design solutions for site-upgrade, acquisition support (GA drawings), and build permit applications, upgrade, build-to-suit and independent new site designs.

Connect44 offers a portfolio of site infrastructure surveys for various customer requirements.

Site Measured Surveys can be completed on all site types; the outcome of a measured survey is a comprehensively detailed site plan and elevation illustrating the dimensions of a site, all of its component parts and the component parts in relation to one another.

Measured surveys can also include site audit and asset register, detailing none-infrastructure hardware components and their locations on a site, such as ground based cabinets and antennas mounted at height.

Tower Condition Surveys are in increasing demand as the proliferation of mobile network towers in Europe from the mid 1980s becomes an aging infrastructure of millions of metal towers and site infrastructure elements.

Our in-house engineers complete condition surveys on towers and site infrastructure for various customer outcome requirements; towers are often surveyed for input to load calculation models. Where the tower manufacturers data is available a load comparison is created from when the tower was newly manufactured, to its current calculated capability, validating the continued suitability of the structure or potential requirement for strengthening.

Planned/routine condition surveys on more recent infrastructures and sites check the general condition of infrastructure, such as corrosion condition, fixing tightness, cable management condition, cabin and cabinet environmental conditions, etc. Observing and identifying maintenance fixes to save greater costs later.

Our engineers complete site upgrade and new site designs for all vendor, MNO, TowerCo and site provider requirements. Sites are designed according to the national and local planning conditions and statutes.

Designs include RAN and transmission accommodation, antennas and connectivity, as well as detailed electrical design, compound design, security systems and health and safety requirements for operations and maintenance.

Structural calculation and validation are completed within the national and local statutory requirements of the site location.

We utilise the latest in assessment and calculation tools for structure load calculation and component stress testing validation; where towers can be accommodated in tools; where a tower is unique or cannot be loaded into a tool, we possess the skills and knowledge to manually calculate the results.

Our greenfield site design capability includes all tower types and applications of new build and infrastructure upgrade.

From basic simple monopole sites to multi-operator heavy shared infrastructures, we have designed all types in all settings within the thousands of designs completed by the Connect44 Planning and Design team.

We complete upgrades ranging from basic additional mounting brackets, head-frame upgrades and strengthening, to complete infrastructure replacement, or, recycling existing structures by strengthening legacy components, such as foundation extension, which is more often a more rapid and cost-effective solution.

We have also designed exoskeletons around monopoles, lattice towers and stub-towers to provide effective solutions when replacement isn’t possible and traditional strengthening does not suffice.

We have completed Rooftop designs on all types of commercial and residential properties, accommodating EMF/ICNIRP regulations through intelligent design and working with MNOs to maximise the radio characteristics, satisfy local authority planners and deign within regulation.

Rooftop designs pose the greatest challenges as rooftop sites become increasingly denser in our cities. Our engineers will always find solutions, even creating retro-skeletons through buildings to provide load-capability for large rooftop sites.

We excel at these challenges. Working smarter. Delivering solutions.

Our in-building site design Centre of Excellence is based in Den Haag, Netherlands and supports in-country delivery teams across our BUs to deliver DAS, small-cell and hybrid macro-outdoor and DAS-indoor solutions.

Connect44 design engineers have completed survey and design activities for figurehead projects, such as Schiphol Airport and numerous main rail stations and commercial centres.

As with all of our services, we provide an end-to-end solution from feasibility through to a design solution accepted by all stakeholder parties, we can then build your system and provide monitoring and active operational management through our international NOC centres. Plan, Build, Manage. Connect44, end-to-end solutions.

Connect44 can provide any part or all of the design scope of a site.

We complete comprehensive site electrical schemes for all manner of site types and customer requirements, from lighting to remote access systems; from antenna system power to electricity provider main supply calculations, from equipment power distribution systems to lightning protection systems; we have you covered.

ICNIRP/EMF (EMF) compliance is defined and designed on a country-by-country and municipality requirements basis.

EMF statutory requirements can be modelled in the Connect44 3D digital environment platform, where it is possible to live-model EMF changes directly to design amendments, speeding up the design solution feasibility stage.

Our engineers also provide manual EMF measurement surveys for detailed designs and to conform to various country and commune requirements for absolute accuracy and prediction of EMF safety limits. Working with MNOs to provide parameterised solutions when required.

Our design engineers have a broad breadth and depth of design solution knowledge and experience, providing solutions under some of the strictest EMF statutes in the world. We provide solutions and define detailed justifications and validations to local planning authorities using advanced illustration techniques for EMF propagation to achieve planning permits, providing pre and post build illustrations for single and multi-occupier sites.

We complete acquisition surveys, where the lease is out of date or may have lapsed. These surveys consider all available legacy information and re-engage the site provider to establish the status of the site lease position. The output of the service is a site provider relationship, lease status and recommendations on proceeding with the customers intended outcome. In the case where there are no existing records and in cooperation with our engineering team a site design survey is commissioned to create a site as-built design, asset status, latent structural capability and where required a 3D-environment model of the site for online site review by customer personnel, without having to visit the site.

Our company utilises a balance of technology and knowledge base to achieve customer-positive lease outcomes.

Our operatives are experienced in their own right but also consistently improve their skills by drawing on the knowledge base of out acquisition Centre of Excellence in Denmark; this provides a wealth of experience and options to all of our operatives when progressing difficult or unusual lease renewal activities.

Our web-enabled automation tools provide a near-instant wealth of site history and comparative lease and financial information to operatives wherever and whenever it becomes relevant. This has proven to be incredibly useful to rapidly conclude negotiations through the presentation of comparative data.

Our team of experts, in co-operation with their Connect44 Planning and Design Department colleagues, as required, submit hundreds if not thousands of build-permit applications per year to local authorities and municipalities. Our operations manage all acquisition scenarios, new site ‘Build to Suit’, generic new site builds, upgrades, decommissioning of redundant site infrastructure and exit agreements.

Our teams are well versed in pre-qualification lobbying at all levels from members of parliament to local municipality members. We would always try to use reason to achieve the most optimal outcome and reference due-process and the law as required to fairly and correctly represent and achieve the customers desired outcome. In some cases we will use the full force of local and national statutes to achieve the customers desired outcome, in cooperation with the customers instructions.

We also undertake and maintain estate management services, whereby we will manage sites on behalf of customers for routine activities, such as maintaining the site for access, lock and compound maintenance, routine site owner relationship activities, etc. Our customers have achieved a significant cost-benefit in this type of relationship management which mitigates friction when new projects are initiated, it also smooths the path for out of contract site access and build activities; further benefits include a longer notice term for site quit notices and a better position for remaining in tenancy than approaching a site provider reactively when the time to negotiate change has passed.

Working with our in-house design experts, we can deliver a RAN design incorporated into an overall site design, or, deliver an independent RAN design on a legacy site.

Our SMEs have experience across new site design, optimising space, power and location and all forms of site upgrade and swap from simple hardware swaps through cabinet conversion and re-use by parasitic-swap and complex vendor hardware and software hot-swaps, minimising downtime through detailed project planning, logistics and implementation planning.

Connect44 manages a number of logistics options through partners with specific logistical expertise in transmission, RAN, rollout & delivery, spare parts management (SPM) and bulk materials handling; each with a logistics tracking system designed for specific logistical and project requirements.

Specialist logistics partners also provide field-testbed facilities to manage pre-configuration of hardware and software solutions and pre-test hardware, recycled hardware and firmware to mitigate aborted activities on site.

For some high risk, complex activities and hot-swap projects we may pre-build and prepare solutions at off-site facilities to significantly de-risk issues on-site during implementation.

For legacy sites receiving additional hardware configurations, new sites and hardware swap activities, Connect44 delivers construction and infrastructure services to fulfil the pre-requisites required for hardware installation (personnel protection measures, plinths, grillage, ducting, cable management, antenna mounting systems including head frame swaps and tower strengthening and extensions), power distribution, earthing, lightning protection systems (LPS), etc.

Our site build PMO, Project Management and Delivery Management functions are specialists in end-to-end site build. From feasibility to acceptance, we manage the build process to ensure build schedules, design adherence, cost control and quality at every stage of the build.

In cooperation with your logistics partner process or ours, Connect44 have managed hardware delivery and installation for over two decades across a vast range of technologies, customers and network operators across the UK and Europe.

Since 2020 we have been welcoming and assimilating new vendors, technologies and suppliers across our Open-RAN (ORAN) ecosystem from feasibility, through delivery through to TTO and NOC services.

As highly experienced system installers and commissioners, Connect44 delivers a range of network element and system commissioning services across all telecommunications sectors in RAN transport, backhaul and core network technologies.

Connect44 have completed more than sixty thousand RAN and transport integration activities since 2000, through on-site resources supported by our near-shore remote operations centres and back-office functions serving the UK and Europe, located in Romania, Spain, UK and Malaysia, providing an unrivalled breadth and depth of integration resource and back-office support

Our engineers and operatives are not limited by technology, geography or OEM, as we work across all OEMs, across the UK, EU and Scandinavia and across all generations of transport solutions, mobile and core networks.

Our Post integration services fulfil a range of customer requirements from the monitoring of proofs of concepts across single-customer, multi-national locations to near-sure remote 24/7/365 operational monitoring from one of our four NOCs.

Connect44 delivers order management services on behalf of clients to mitigate delivery delays, onward re-planning and site enablement delay through comprehensive order and order-delivery management, mitigating issues identified in optimising the delivery process and continuous improvement.

Our site preparation activities originate from, and the quality of the outcome flows from the site survey accuracy; site preparation activities are delivered by our highly skilled and qualified operatives, subsidiary companies and local preferred delivery partners.

Ground based transport solution provision is delivered by our fibre delivery team as an FTTx deliverable, by a third party FTTx provider. Our radio transport solutions team, operating multiple field teams to install, commission and optimise point-to-point microwave radio solutions for MNO’s and enterprise installations. All solutions’ delivery is supported by our back-office delivery teams, managing access, outage processing, documentation, Handover Packs (HOP) and supporting transfer to operations (TTO).

Fibre provision connectivity to complete the physical end-to-end (e2e) solution design is completed at the end-site with the installation, configuration and connection of routers and gateways for fibre connections, also ensuring that interim connectivity through jumpering and cascading is completed, enabling the end-to-end physical connectivity for an integrated end-to-end transport solution.

Mitigating the failure to complete planned activities in a given window is key to delivering on time, maintaining the delivery schedule and minimising customer service downtime, we mitigate such failures as far as practicably possible by, for instance, carrying spare parts for common problems, implementing detailed planning exercises and through continuous improvement processes.

The final piece in delivering end-to-end transport solutions is completed by our transport integration team; able to operate 24/7 across our Network Operating Centres and Malaysian Delivery Operations Centre our teams are highly competent in transmission connectivity, logical transport connectivity and migration of traffic from legacy to new solution or to implement transport solution upgrades, for an end-to-end design configuration.

Connect44 has a very broad range of NOC services across all radio and fibre technologies; the company has a history of monitoring and managing one of the UKs largest MNOs core network and monitors and operates multiple EU network operators networks and infrastructures across DAS, 2G to 5G and ORAN.