Italian firm Calzavara first spoke with TowerXchange following their success at the Milan Expo 2015 and discussed with us the evolution of concealed towers from artificial trees to their then futuristic Mosaictower. In this interview, we take a look at what two years of innovation brought to the company’s catalogue of solutions and its enhanced geographical footprint.
TowerXchange: Although known to TowerXchange, please reintroduce our readers to Calzavara and its role in the telecom infrastructure ecosystem.
Marco Calzavara, CEO, Calzavara S.p.A.:
Our headquarters are located in Basiliano, a small village in the north-east of Italy, not far away from Venice and close to the Slovenian and Austrian borders.
Established in 1966, Calzavara’s core business has been the development of innovative infrastructure for the mobile telecom industry. Our strategy was and has always been to be different from traditional tower suppliers. In fact, we operate in a niche sector with the involvement of different stakeholders such as municipalities, regulators for urban city landscapes, tower companies and, of course, network operators.
Calzavara offers tailored infrastructure solutions that adapt to the specific requirements of the market. We specialise in low environmental impact solutions such as harmonised and urban design structures at reasonable prices.
TowerXchange: What is the scale of your telecom business and what is your global footprint?
Andrea Pupil, General Manager, Calzavara S.p.A.:
We now employ 130 people and operate in Europe, the Middle East, the United States, South America, the Middle East, Australia, as well as China.
Today, Calzavara is a well-established company with a worldwide presence achieved thanks to a strong network of commercial partners who are able to deliver our products and services, and to guarantee excellent customer support.
TowerXchange: Tell us about a couple of your latest projects.
Massimo Calzavara, Business Development Director, Calzavara S.p.A.:
Our latest expansion plans took us to the Middle East as well as the United States, China and Australia.
In the Middle East, we recently worked on an urban furniture project in Saudi Arabia for the city of Riyadh which was extremely rewarding. To date, we are bidding to work for the Dubai Expo and we are seeing a big push for harmonised solutions across the Middle East in countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar. But we’ve been deploying harmonised urban solutions in other markets such as Panama.
In LatAm, we have launched a joint venture in Chile where we are adapting our solutions to their landscape requirements and created an ad hoc harmonised tower that resembles the typical Chilean palm tree. Additionally, in China we’ve installed several multiservice towers suitable for small cell deployments, as well as our well known Dicecell in Beijing.
TowerXchange: We understand concealment and EMF regulations are particularly strict in your domestic Italian market; how has the design of cell sites evolved to accommodate these requirements?
Andrea Pupil, General Manager, Calzavara S.p.A.:
With regards to concealments, we first offered artificial tree solutions around 20 years ago. Back then, we utilised our long-standing experience with steel structures and combined it with innovative know-how in fibreglass, resins and plastic materials. Once we introduced our tree solutions, we realised that the market was seeking different tree models depending on the geographical location and local flora, so we started designing black and maritime pines, different types of palm trees and cypresses.
Since the launch of 3G, our new challenge has been to develop design products able to meet certain aesthetic standards, specifically designed for urban areas and suitable for co-location. Towers are becoming urban furniture and with this in mind, we aren’t only working on practical and safe solutions, but also creating a product in harmony with the urban environment. In order to answer to the need for beauty, we’ve come up with a new line of infrastructure, perfectly integrated with urban surroundings, known as Telestyle.
Telestyle is certainly not our final innovation. In fact, we are committed to constantly pursuing new solutions for the market able to incorporate new materials, LED lights, monitoring devices, displays and other integrated features to respond to new needs and requirements.
The deployment of networks featuring micro and picocells represents the latest frontier to the growing demand for connectivity – anytime, anywhere – characterising both urban environment and densely populated areas. And we should keep in mind the future evolution of IoT technologies for smart cities.
TowerXchange: How is the telecom infrastructure industry evolving in terms of site typology demand and how is Calzavara keeping up with these changes?
Massimo Calzavara, Business Development Director, Calzavara S.p.A:
We have just participated in the Mobile World Congress and once again realised that the infrastructure and smart technology worlds don’t necessarily interact with each other. We are now heavily involved in the design of new site typologies with the ability to offer greater levels of connectivity and suitable for smart cities, 5G deployments and beyond.
With regards to 5G, this technology requires a set of macro-towers able to host antennas even larger than those utilised for LTE and also micro-cells to intensify coverage in specific areas.
Products such as Cells-on-Wheels (CoW) are traditionally utilised to cover large events but we are going beyond with our newly launched Dicecell in the United States. This product has been developed and engineered as a modular pole that can measure anywhere between 4m and 12m in height for the various types of coverage required.
This pole is an interconnection point for telecom companies and smart cities as it can host one or more small cells operators as well as 4G LTE antennas. It features two types of modules of different measurements which can be personalised and offer various types of services such as security cameras, public lights, mobile phone chargers, parking payment machines. Additionally, we are developing a management software to allow the true concept of smart pole, which will be enriched with smart metering hardware to measure temperature, humidity, pollution levels and beyond (e.g. traffic control, security proactive warnings).
So this type of poles is designed and conceived for urban context – not only to fit by size but also to serve urban environments. It is smaller and modular and allows our customers unprecedented levels of personalisation in terms of fitting adverts, branding or other images on each module.
These products are also useful to avoid the installation of unfitting, un-harmonised structures in a given territory and to speed up the permitting process by the city councils and other municipal authorities. In addition, towercos and operators can offer municipalities value added services such as security cameras or pollution sensors by installing these poles.
These poles are fiberised and suitable for 4G, LTE and 5G multi-operator services and will serve large-scale gatherings like concerts or sporting events where traditional systems usually fail.
By next June we’ll have developed the beta version of a software to allow different parties to manage their components on the pole, verifying the status of their antennas, assessing the need for inspections or maintenance, checking the temperature of their equipment, et cetera. This will fully enable towercos to rent spaces on these poles to multiple tenants and enabling each of them to manage their bits. And this type of management isn’t restricted to operators, extending to anyone utilising the pole such as advertising agencies, security companies, et cetera.
This is a new type of service to remotely manage infrastructure which will allow considerable long-term savings.
TowerXchange: Finally, please sum up how you would differentiate Calzavara from other telecom turnkey infrastructure providers?
Marco Calzavara, CEO, Calzavara S.p.A.:
Our design is like no other and I am not only talking about the aesthetics (beauty), but also to the engineering and overall quality. This year we’ve gone even further in terms of our service offerings and we are expanding the software component and beyond.
We have 50 years of history and are now becoming a design, engineering and software firm in line with market demands.
Our catalogue goes beyond traditional solutions such as macro-towers to offer urban furniture, harmonised solutions and more. Not many companies out there are actually able to “walk the talk” and carry out what they set out for themselves; we pride ourselves on offering options for all types of settings, no matter how complex their permitting or environmental needs are.
