Mobile phone antennas
SOFICO makes areas along its infrastructures available to mobile telephone companies to allow them to place their antenna and improve the coverage in Wallonia. This also reduces the spread of visual and environmental nuisance.
In December 2005, SOFICO entered into an agreement with the three main mobile phone operators (Proximus, Base and Orange), and also with the Astrid network used by emergency services and the police. These operators then relocated their antenna and other equipment used as part of the “multi-operator” installations to appropriate areas that SOFICO made available to them.
With the explosion in the need for mobile data transmission, operators are now finalising the implementation of 4G networks and preparing the deployment of 5thgeneration equipment, offering even faster speeds. Transmission capacity requirements are so high that the hertzian wave transmissions between pylons are no longer enough to return the quantity of data to the data concentrator sites. Therefore, SOFICO has undertaken several large-scale projects to connect mobile telephone operators’ antenna to the optical fibre network.
