Bespoke urban multifunctional solutions for 5Gmm wave antennas

Please tell us who you are and what sets you apart?

At Calzavara, we are 125 people and more than 30% are graduates, we have a lot of research and development happening in-house. We have a very strong brand and solid reputation, comparing to some other competitors on the market, we’ve been here for quite some time. We sell around the world, from Mexico to Australia, and we can adapt our product to the needs of a particular market. We offer a service that doesn't have demand capacity or production issues, but in each situation, we work to optimise our offering. For example, sometimes we have to lower the pricing and account for materials differences if selling the solutions we developed for Europe to other countries, e.g. China or Saudi Arabia.

For each market that we operate in, we start with redefining the supply chain and adapt the product. We are far more advanced in terms of mechanics. We have now launched a line of new generation infrastructure solutions that goes beyond pure telecommunications, as demonstrated in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia earlier this year. We studied the ventilation that was necessary for the tenant to cool down their equipment and avoid disruption of services because of the overheating. Our types of designs are unique and require a long time, sometimes over a year, to develop. Other companies on the market often lack this expertise, and just offer more of the same. We are different, I would say that we are in between of what simple manufacturing companies offer, companies that are basically just production lines. In fact, we sometimes partner with them as well, but what we offer is custom engineering.

What we offer goes beyond simple manufacturing. We offer assistance in designing bespoke solutions. When it comes to materials, we work hard to integrate and test all materials we use - plastic, polycarbonate, fibreglass. In Europe, in Italy and in France, we do the installation ourselves or we commission our partners to do so. In Saudi Arabia, our company will sign an agreement with the local partner that actually offers turnkey solutions. That means that we can work on projects with very varied scope, from very small ones to very large ones – effectively. Some of the solutions we offer are well established on the market but now we also offer many more new, innovative products and services. For example, the one thing that we’ve been working on over the last two years, is the development of a social impact balance sheet. We are currently investing a lot of time, energy and money in improving or supply chains for materials such as steel – this is also one of the topics that I will be addressing at the Dragon’s Den session at TowerXchange Meetup Europe in London.

I’m looking forward to presenting at the Dragon’s Den session at TowerXchange Meetup Europe 2023. First of all, because it's an opportunity to share some of my views on the evolution of tower markets and the solutions we offer to an international audience. The London event always has participants from so many different countries attending, so we've been thinking a lot about how to contribute to the discussions at the event. One topic that we’d like to talk about is Open-RAN, another is ESG, the third is Quality Engineering, and also the transition to 5G. All of these are relevant to what our company does. As a company, we take into consideration these and other market developments and respond to them accordingly. We’d like to provide examples of how the new generation of infrastructure solutions can embed these values. In this industry, there are providers that copy some of the solutions on the market, but we’d like to explain how what we offer is unique and developed by our teams from scratch – to pioneer technologies that reflect our client needs and priorities.

In urban areas, our solutions will not involve single rooftop application, we will demonstrate the designs to engineering solutions from an ESG perspective, applied to the smart city, showing our new polyfunctional solutions. These towers have evolved from our legacy solutions, but the new applications will be firstly launched in London at our booth. We will focus on the new materials and how good engineering can improve both ROI and monetisation, can reduce opex and add ESG value. Lastly, I will talk about how technology is applied to the tower business, discussing the specific strategies to improve ROI.

We are a team of highly qualified and experienced engineers, we are not just a manufacturer. We don’t just provide our clients with posts on demand, our expertise lies in offering specialist highly tailored engineering solutions that are engineered to exactly fit the needs of a particular client. Also, because we operate globally, we can learn lessons from one region and apply them to another. For example, when developing solutions for clients in Australia, we’ve done a lot of testing and came up with ways of dealing with overheating antennas. This is something that is also highly relevant to other southern countries, such as Saudi Arabia or South Korea. With clients located all over the world, we have a chance to test all infrastructure solutions thoroughly in one geography, to see how it fits with the overall infrastructure, before offering them to our clients globally.

In terms of infrastructure suitable for the urban environments, at the moment we are focusing on the smart city concept. In fact, it’s no longer just a concept, it’s becoming reality. There are countries such as Saudi Arabia, where big projects to develop smart urban infrastructure are already ongoing. But then there are countries, for example in Europe, in which you need to adapt cities to the capacity needs, rather than building new cities from scratch. This isn’t always early, and what we are talking about is a massive need for small cells, DAS systems, in-building solutions and other street furniture and antenna systems that you won’t place on the rooftops. In most of these cities, you can’t have an off-the-shelf solution, but you will need to create something that is really quite unique in each separate case.

And so, we are also starting to invest in active equipment, which is, as I’ve mentioned, is one other topic that we’d like to touch upon in our presentation at TowerXchange Meetup Europe 2023. My goal with our presentation will be to stimulate the minds of the audience members and show them different things to take into consideration when creating products for the smart cities that can be sustainable and well-designed.