Telecommunications towers in the United Kingdom are operated mainly by

Arqiva Arqiva () is a British telecommunications company which provides infrastructure, broadcast transmission and smart meter facilities in the United Kingdom. The company is headquartered at the former Independent Broadcasting Authority headquart ...

. Arqiva operates the transmitters for UK terrestrial TV and most

radio Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmi ...

broadcasting, both analogue and digital. BT also operates a number of

telecommunications Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that fe ...

towers in the UK. BT Telecoms Tower, Stoke Park, Bristol, England arp

BT

BT's towers were, at one time, the backbone for a national line-of-sight

microwave Microwave is a form of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths ranging from about one meter to one millimeter corresponding to frequencies between 300 MHz and 300 GHz respectively. Different sources define different frequency ra ...

telecommunications network. One of the most famous of these is the

BT Tower The BT Communication Tower is a grade II listed communications tower located in Fitzrovia, London, owned by BT Group. Originally named the Museum Radio Tower (after the adjacent Museum telephone exchange), it became better known by its unoff ...

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 BT Group plc ( trading as BT and formerly British Telecom) is a British multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is the largest provider of fixed-line, bro ...

owns at least 200 radio masts and towers in

Britain Britain most often refers to: * The United Kingdom, a sovereign state in Europe comprising the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland and many smaller islands * Great Britain, the largest island in the United King ...

. 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: The other seven are:

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

microcell A microcell is a cell in a mobile phone network served by a low power cellular base station (tower), covering a limited area such as a mall, a hotel, or a transportation hub. A microcell is usually larger than a picocell, though the distinction ...

s, 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. Since the discontinuation of the Ofcom sitefinder website in 2015, Estate Systems Ltd have developed a comprehensive sit
www.mastdata.com
for use by the public and mobile operators (subject to a fee) which locates masts within the UK and Northern Ireland. Arqiva sold its mast business for telecoms to Cellnex. They no longer operate in this area.

Military

There are also numerous

military A military, also known collectively as armed forces, is a heavily armed, highly organized force primarily intended for warfare. It is typically authorized and maintained by a sovereign state, with its members identifiable by their distinct ...

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.{{Cite web, title = RSG: Features: The Towers of Backbone., url = http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/features/backbone/, website = www.subbrit.org.uk, accessdate = 2015-11-19

BT

List of BT towers

Mobile phone

Military

History

See also

References

External links