Telecom equipment we source

Remote radio units sit outdoors at the top of the tower, carrying the power amplifier and transceiver away from the cabinet.

An active antenna unit integrates the radio and the antenna array into one assembly, which is what makes massive MIMO practical on a tower that cannot carry separate radios and panels.

The baseband unit is where a site's capacity actually lives, and because it is normally a chassis populated with plug-in boards rather than a sealed product, most enquiries are for a specific board rather than a whole unit.

A base station cabinet is an enclosure, and what makes it a working site is everything fitted inside it — baseband, radios, power, battery backup and the interconnect between them.

A GPS antenna and the antenna line devices around it are low-cost items that stop a site commissioning when they are wrong, which is why they generate more urgent enquiries than their value suggests.

Microwave links carry backhaul where fibre is uneconomic, which describes a great deal of network in Africa and the interior of the Gulf.

This is one of the largest categories in the catalogue, and the one where sourcing is hardest.

Fibre access rollouts across Africa and the Gulf run predominantly on a handful of OLT platforms, and expansion is normally a service board added to an existing chassis rather than a new chassis.

Pluggable optics are the most commodity-like items in this catalogue and also the ones where vendor coding causes the most trouble.

Network switch and routing hardware in carrier networks is almost always modular, and almost always tied to a software release.

Most telecom equipment failures are board failures, and most board replacements are cheaper than the platform documentation implies — provided the board is identified correctly.

Site power is the least glamorous and most failure-prone part of a telecom site, and unlike radio equipment it is largely vendor-agnostic — a −48 V rectifier of the right output and form factor will serve a site regardless of whose radios are on the tower.

Fibre optic cable and cable assemblies are ordered by length and connector, and the length is usually encoded in the part number suffix — which means a single assembly appears as a dozen near-identical part numbers that differ only in metres.

Fan units fail predictably, sunshields crack in the sun, and neither is expensive — but a fan failure will take a shelf offline and the replacement part is model-specific in a way that is almost never documented publicly.