The supporting equipment of a cell site may include equipment that enables the cell site to communicate discretely in each of its wireless coverage areas, so as to facilitate separate operation of each wireless coverage area, RF channel frequency (carrier), and/or air interface technology. To facilitate this, the supporting equipment of a cell site may include a baseband digital unit (BBU) and one or more remote radio heads (RRHs), with the baseband unit being configured to encode/decode data on a per coverage area basis, and each RRH being configured to modulate/demodulate encoded data on a per coverage area basis and including a power amplifier to amplify output transmissions per coverage area.

In practice, a cell site's baseband unit may be coupled with the network infrastructure and may take the form of a shelf unit holding one or more channel cards, one channel card for each carrier on which the cell site is configured to operate, with each channel card including logic modules (e.g., circuitry and/or one or more programmed processing units) to separately provide baseband unit functionality such as encoding/decoding for each sector of the cell site. Thus, if the cell site is to provide service on two carriers and has three sectors, then the baseband unit may include two channel cards, with each channel card having modules for separately serving the three sectors of the cell site. Each channel card may further be configured or designed for operation according to a specific air interface technology, such as LTE or CDMA. In an example cell arrangement, the baseband unit could be situated at the base of an antenna tower, if a tower is provided. In an alternative cell arrangement, the BBU may be located remotely from the geographical location of the cell site and or cell tower (or towers).