Cellular Design Services (CDS) was formed in 1995, bringing together expertise in both radio frequency engineering and property acquisition to provide a broad range of high-quality services for the communications industry.
CDS is the market leader in the wireless communications industry – in particular wireless network design, coverage planning, coverage measurement and testing, site implementation, network optimisation and on-going maintenance.
With third generation (3G) generation phones (mobile phones that allow you to communicate with images and video, in addition to voice and text messaging) increasing in popularity, new wireless networks have to be developed in order to accommodate this demand.
In simple terms this involves deciding on the best locations for new base stations (one base station costs upwards of £100,000) and on the number of base stations required as part of a network. Due to the technology involved in third generation mobile phones, the number of factors influencing such decisions are enormous i.e. proximity to other base stations, visually acceptable, cost, environmental issues etc.
Traditionally, such decisions are made manually – a system that is both time-consuming and expensive. CDS, due to their collaboration with Cardiff University’s School of Computer Science, has developed a software-based system that can automatically locate the optimal infrastructure for any wireless network.
This innovative collaboration allows for a very significant reduction in the number of base stations in a network which results in savings of £1m+ per network.
This software has already been used to develop large wireless networks in Austria and London.