While the distributed architecture of the BBU-RRH deployment can help the capacity and services of a cell site keep pace with evolving demand, it can also introduce problems when capabilities and/or design characteristics of incrementally introduced equipment are mismatched. More specifically, there can be a mismatch between the number of ports on an RRH and the number of ports on an antenna or antenna system to which the RRH connects. Adapting a deployment to account for such a mismatch can involve combining signals from two or more ports on the component (RRH or antenna) having the larger number ports so as to reduce the number of connections made on the component having the fewer number of ports, thereby matching the reduced number of connections to the fewer number of ports. Although this approach can address the mismatch in the number of ports on the respective components, hardware elements—e.g., combiners—that combine two or more input signals into a single output signal can produced insertion loss in the communication path between ports of the respective components. Depending on the number of RRHs, the number of antenna systems, and the respective numbers of ports than need to be connected between them, insertion loss between the RRHs and the antenna systems can vary on a per-connection basis depending on how many (if any) combiners are used on each RF path. As a result, different RF paths between RRHs and antennas may be subject to different amounts of attenuation. This, in turn, can become problematic for communication services that concurrently utilize two or more channels that traverse RF paths having disparate attenuation.