Ericsson to upgrade Cellnex's Polish tower RAN; no contract value disclosed

Cellnex has selected Ericsson to upgrade the radio access network across its Polish tower sites, and the announcement names the equipment — new radios, RAN compute modules, microwave links, antennas and enclosures — while leaving the economics unstated. The carrier on the other side is Plus, the Polish mobile brand of Polkomtel, which will run Ericsson's 5G RAN kit on Cellnex infrastructure, as Data Center Dynamics first reported.

Cellnex's Polish estate has a short corporate history: the company completed the takeover of its Polish unit in 2023, buying the 30 percent of OnTower Poland it did not already own from Iliad. Ericsson brings its own domestic base to the work, with roughly 2,000 R&D engineers in Kraków and Łódź and European production in Tczew handled with partner Flex.

The hardware list is specific. Ericsson's MINI-LINK 6356 E-band radio carries high-capacity microwave backhaul at better power efficiency, and its Transport Automation Controller sits over that backhaul with what the vendor calls AI-driven automation and smarter network management. The AIR 3229 dual-band TDD Massive MIMO radio, a Polish debut according to Ericsson, combines C band and 2600 TDD in a single unit to cut tower footprint and speed the 5G rollout.

Three design claims are written for the landlord: improved energy performance, a lower physical footprint, and reduced tower load versus earlier generations, all of it built with Ericsson silicon. For an owner of steel, that is where controllable cost sits — in less weight on the structure and less power drawn at the site. Cellnex Poland's Leszek Lis described the work as a response to mobile data growth that requires both modernization of active equipment and more sites to densify service, alongside energy efficiency, equipment optimization, network resiliency and environmental effects. Martin Mellor, who heads Ericsson Poland, said the modernization uses the vendor's latest technology and is aimed at high-performance 5G nationwide, spanning consumer, enterprise and mission-critical use cases.

What the announcement does not carry is a figure. Scope named in detail, economics withheld: the coverage puts no contract value, no contract term and no deployment schedule on the work, the same asymmetry this publication has documented across recent infrastructure announcements, and the reporting says nothing about how much of the spending is new rather than a maintenance cycle already budgeted on the Polish estate.

Ericsson's argument for the kit is that it supports programmable networks, configurable on demand to offer different service levels to different customers, and that capability is what Plus would sell. The upgrade keeps Cellnex's Polish sites current and cheaper to run; the question the equipment list does not answer is whether Plus can sell enough differentiated service to justify the next round of densification.