The Signal Lines is an independent technical journal on the mobile-network landscape of Cyprus — written from Nicosia, from the published filings of the Department of Electronic Communications, from the conversations on the rooftops where the cells live, and from a long working memory of the island's networks since the GSM switch-on of October 1995.
Each note is a slow reading of one layer of the Cyprus mobile-network world — the launch, the spectrum, the 5G rollout, the fibre backhaul, the mountain hops — written from the published record, the field walks, and the long memory of the technical community.
The first GSM cell in Cyprus went on the air at half past three on the afternoon of the eighteenth of October 1995, from a rooftop on Themistokli Dervi Avenue in central Nicosia. A reading of the technical decisions that produced that switch-on — the 900 MHz allocation, the early Ericsson kit, the link to the Larnaca exchange, the first seventeen base stations.
Read the note →
The Cyprus mobile spectrum is, in 2026, distributed across seven principal bands — 700, 800, 900, 1800, 2100, 2600 and 3500 MHz — among three licensed operators. A reading of how each band is used, where the propagation characteristics matter, and why the 700 MHz auction of 2020 reshaped the rural coverage map of the island.
Read the note →
The first commercial 5G cell on the island lit up in January 2021, on a non-standalone (NSA) core, in the n78 band at 3.5 GHz. By the end of 2025 the network was substantially standalone, the small-cell density in Nicosia and Limassol had quintupled, and the coverage maps of the three operators looked very different from the 4G maps that preceded them.
Read the note →
A mobile cell is only as fast as the backhaul that connects it. The Cyprus backhaul story is a story of submarine cables — eight active systems landing on the southern and the eastern coasts — feeding an inland fibre ring that connects the major exchanges, and onwards to the cell sites by dedicated point-to-point fibre or by 80 GHz microwave. A reading of the route a packet takes from a Limassol handset to Frankfurt.
Read the note →
The Troodos massif is, for a mobile-network engineer, the most interesting geography on the island — a granite-and-gabbro range rising to nineteen hundred and fifty metres, with deep valleys, line-of-sight shadows, and forty mountain villages of fewer than five hundred residents each. A reading of how three operators have, over twenty-five years, threaded coverage through that geometry.
Read the note →
Thirty-one years on the Cyprus telecommunications beat, the first nineteen as a radio-planning engineer and the last twelve as a technical writer. Worked on the original 1995 GSM rollout in the southern suburbs of Nicosia; now writes from a small office above the bakery on Solomos Square. More on the project →