Telecommunications towers in the United Kingdom explained

Telecommunications towers in the United Kingdom are operated mainly by Arqiva.[1] Arqiva operates the transmitters for UK terrestrial TV and most radio broadcasting, both analogue and digital. BT also operates a number of telecommunications towers in the UK.

BT

See main article: British Telecom microwave network. BT's towers were, at one time, the backbone for a national line-of-sight microwave telecommunications network. One of the most famous of these is the BT Tower in London. However, the introduction of fibre optic network technology rendered these microwave towers largely obsolete for their original purpose. Nowadays they tend to be used mainly for relatively low capacity fixed links to customer sites and mobile telephony.

List of BT towers

BT Group owns at least 200 radio masts and towers in Britain.[2] Of these, fourteen are reinforced concrete towers. The rest are of steel lattice construction.

Seven of the fourteen are of similar design, known as the 'Chilterns' type, after the first one which was built at Stokenchurch on the Chiltern Hills.They are identical except for their heights, which vary considerably. They are at:

TowerLocationCoordinatesHeight Year of built
Stokenchurch BT TowerStokenchurch, Buckinghamshire51.6654°N -0.9238°W120 m (394 ft)
Charwelton BT TowerCharwelton, Northamptonshire52.2023°N -1.251°W118 m (387 ft)
Pye Green BT TowerPye Green, Staffordshire52.7287°N -2.0196°W96.9 m (318 ft)
Wotton-under-Edge BT TowerWotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire51.6493°N -2.304°W76.2 m (250 ft)
Heaton Park BT TowerManchester53.5396°N -2.2552°W72.54 m (238 ft)
Sutton Common BT TowerMacclesfield, Cheshire53.2061°N -2.1007°W72 m (238 ft)
Tinshill BT TowerCookridge area, Leeds, West Yorkshire53.8548°N -1.612°W60.96 m (200 ft)
The other seven are:
TowerLocationCoordinatesHeight Year of built
Huddersfield, West Yorkshire53.6121°N -1.6644°W330.5 m (1084 ft)1970
London BT TowerLondon51.5215°N -0.1389°W188.4 m (618 ft)1964
Birmingham BT TowerBirmingham52.4835°N -1.9043°W152 m (499 ft)1965
Morborne Hill BT TowerPeterborough, Cambridgeshire52.5076°N -0.3446°W98.75 m (324 ft)
Purdown BT TowerBristol51.4852°N -2.5627°W70.1 m (230 ft)1970
Tolsford Hill BT TowerFolkestone, Kent51.1075°N 1.0848°W67.36 m (221 ft)
Turners Hill BT TowerDudley, West Midlands52.4964°N -2.049°W60.96 m (200 ft)

Mobile phone

Below the level of the major telecommunications towers, mobile phone operators run roughly 23,000 base stations. In urban areas, these are almost all rooftop sites or microcells, but in rural areas these are often on towers, frequently owned by BT or Arqiva. The Sitefinder database is an incomplete list of mobile phone base stations in the UK.[3]

Since the discontinuation of the Ofcom sitefinder website in 2015, Estate Systems Ltd have developed a comprehensive site www.mastdata.com[4] for use by the public and mobile operators (subject to a fee) which locates masts within the UK including Northern Ireland.

Arqiva sold its mast business for telecoms to Cellnex. They no longer operate in this area.

Military

There are also numerous military communications sites in the UK, operated by various wings of the armed forces. Many of the masts and towers at military sites are now marketed to commercial site sharers by Arqiva.

History

The first UK microwave relay towers were built in about 1952 for a television link between Manchester and Kirk o'Shotts near Glasgow. A chain of 14 towers, known as "Backbone", running from the Chilterns to Scotland and intended primarily for national defence in the Cold War, was first mentioned publicly in the 1955 Defence White Paper. It announced "The Post Office are planning to build up a special network, both by cable and radio, designed to maintain long distance communication in the event of an attack". It wasn't actually built until the early 1960s, by which time the original Backbone concept had become absorbed into a much larger microwave network built for a mixture of civil and defence traffic including voice, telegraphy, television and radar.[5]

See also

References

  1. Web site: News :: Competition Commission approves Arqiva and NGW merger . DTG . 2014-04-20.
  2. Crampsey, D. and Fase, M.L. External Engineering, British Telecommunications Engineering, Vol. 10 Part 1 (April 1991), p.13
  3. Web site: Ofcom | Frequently Asked Questions . Stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk . 2010-06-21 . 2014-04-20 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20140321182908/http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/sitefinder/faq . 2014-03-21 .
  4. From Ofcom: The Sitefinder website has now been discontinued. We no longer receive data updates from mobile operators on their mast locations. As a result, the Sitefinder data was several years old and could be very misleading.
  5. Web site: RSG: Features: The Towers of Backbone.. www.subbrit.org.uk. 2015-11-19.

External links